yup, struggle session time
edit: no one is right, everyone is wrong :^)
edit 2: this post is actually dedicated to Amy Goodman, please stop trying to sound cool grandma
I’m Indian and we call ourselves Indian. I don’t get mad when settlers call us Native or Indian. I appreciate the mindset that gets people to say Native instead of Indian, their hearts are in the right place.
In my ideal world, Indian and Native would be dropped in favor of the actual nations name (like Sioux, Dene, Cree, etc.) but often these nations were merged or completely wiped out or the entire nation had its culture wiped out. It would also require an enormous educational and cultural reform in settler America and Canada and people would actually have to learn the name of the nations that lived in their local area and most of the big ones, so I’m not holding my breath.
I’ve been told by a Lakota friend that they get a kick out of being called “indian” because “it reminds us of the white man’s stupidity.”
It wasn’t stupidity, it was an unspoken racialized propaganda campaign to create a feeling of “white nativity”. That’s why I hate the term, and a lot of Native people I’ve talked to agree (shoutout to r/NativeAmerican, one of the only tolerable spaces on reddit). These Know Nothing posters (the 1800s equivalent of Trumpers) weren’t talking about Cherokee and Lakota.
https://mholloway63.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/8420605e.jpg
https://i.redd.it/pz46gslpv7j01.jpg
Genuinely curious: Would you be upset if a Punjabi/Tamil etc. person identified themselves as American Indian?
No, I personally wouldn’t.
I can’t imagine a context where they’d be trying to claim to be from one of the nations that was here pre-Columbus, anyway. If they were, I would be upset just the same as if they were Italian or Malay and trying to get in on that Indian cred. I’m sure people like that could be cheeky about it and be like “but I AM Indian and I AM American” but that’d just make me roll my eyes rather than be truly upset.
