I just got up from conversation with a couple of older black men, that I said “well I got to go back to work and start cracking the whip.” And it occurred to me then that it was probably a really insensitive stupid thing to say.
Sadly, it hadn’t occurred to me until it’s already said.
Idk about that. I’ve met “Native Americans” who prefer the term Indian over Native American.
That’s pretty much all American Indians. Their governmental orgs literally have Indian in their name. My wife does most of her work on a reservation and they all want to be called Indian, not Native American
And it creates a problem for us people from India, because we cannot start saying “south east Asians” or such terms because there are many countries in SE Asia. They should be called indigenous Americans or Native Americans, not Indians. And considering we are 1.5B people and everywhere in the world, we need to have a suitable identifier, where India is suffixed with -n.
You can still be called Indian, there’s no reason they get a monopoly on the name… Just like people call people from USA “Americans” even though that literally applies to 35 countries, you can still call canadians “americans” or peruvians “americans”. Context clues give people a lot of information, you don’t need to always be explicit. You can also do exactly what I did above and specify “American Indian”, which clearly gave you enough information to proceed to make the comment you did…
This is a very dumb argument. Using proper identifiers for citizens of different countries is not a matter of monopoly. Nobody calls the indigenous people of other countries “Indians”, so why should Native Americans be called “Indians”? Ever heard of Australian Aboriginals or Canadian Wet’suwet’en or other people being called “Indians”? This argument is so dumb, should Pakistanis start calling themselves Germans and Russians should start calling themselves Africans, because no monopoly?
America spans 2 whole fucking continents and islands surrounding them. India is not a continent.
Because that is what they were primarily called for hundreds of years, and what many still prefer to be called today.
Note that the American Indian Movement, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Indian reservations, etc all still use the term.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_name_controversy
It’s been changing there much quicker than in the US, but, yes. And Canada’s Indian Act is still in force (and still called that) today.