Newsgroups: alt.native
Subject: Re: Question of Nativity
From: choover@charlie.usd.edu (Christopher J. Hoover)
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 1993 14:42:05 GMT
Reply-To: choover@charlie.usd.edu
Organization: The University of South Dakota Computer Science Dept.

In article <C0Ct5A.DxE@news.iastate.edu>, jerrett@iastate.edu (Gregory A Jerrett) writes:
>In article <1ia9mtINNnsb@usenet.INS.CWRU.Edu> cb926@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Edmund Joseph Ryan) writes:
>>
>>Greetings,
>>
>>With all of the political correctness going on these days, it
>>finally forced "native-american" to replace "american-indian."
>>First of all, I don't think "american-indian" was appropriate
>>because it was a misnomer. "Native-American" while more
>>appropriate casts everyone who came later as permanent   
>>foreigners. If I'm not a descendant of those early Siberians
>>who crossed the Bering Strait, am I not a native American?
>>Isn't native sort of subjective term? Remember the end of
>>Ray Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles"?              
>>
>>I propose to replace "Native-American" with 
>>"Siberian-American" or something more descriptive and 
>>less disparaging of the later immigrants from Europe, 
>>Africa, and Asia. 
>>
>>Virtually,
>>
>>Edmund J. Ryan
>
>And do you refer to yourself as a moron-American?
>
>--

One of the things that's always impressed me about alt.native has been the
relative lack of typical Usenet flamage.  While I appreciate your feelings on
this, Greg, hurling insults at this guy isn't necessarily the best way to
refute his proposal.

So, Edmund, one problem with your proposal is that it carries with it an
assumption that Indians/Amerinds/Native Americans/Whatever-you-choose are, like
Europeans, immigrants to this hemisphere.  Immigration, I think, carries with
_it_ an assumption that a society already existed at the point of destination
which the immigrant then in some way joined.  Indians _are_ the original (or
_aboriginal_) inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere--by definition they are not
immigrants, even if you do accept the Bering Landbridge crossing.

And another problem is that Bering Landbridge assumption.  I'm not sure what I
believe on this issue, but what I do know is that a lot of Native Americans do
in fact believe that they've always been here, and didn't cross the Bering at
all, as do some White ethnologists, anthropologists, and historians (at least
to the extent of believing that Native American origins predate the landbridge,
and so had to come about some other way).

So if the origins are so lost in antiquity, expecting Native Americans to call
themselves Siberian Americans would make even less sense than expecting, say,
Hungarians, to call themselves Mongolian Europeans--which is to say, very
little sense.

Also, not being particularly worried about Political Correctness, I don't care
to get so hung up on labels.  I tend to use Indian and Native American
interchangably, depending on the context:  if I'm mostly around native people,
I refer to my Ioway ancestry as "Indian," since most of the people I'm around
at the time would.  When I'm around more White people, I'm likelier to use
"Native American," mostly because of the risk that some of them might be PCs,
and admonish me for calling people "Indians" when my skin is so white, but also
to remind the ones at the other end of the spectrum of who came first.

Go figure. 


Mitakuye oyasin,

Chris

---

Christopher Hoover                               choover@charlie.usd.edu
Network Coordinator for Student Life             Disclaimer:  Standard.
User Services, University of South Dakota
.sig line:  "I'm still looking for the right quote."