There are no American Indians or Native Americans. The consequence of this is that the original inhabitants of this land are to be called by whatever names they give themselves. We have to discard both 'American Indian' and 'Native American' if we want to be faithful to reality and true to the principle that a People's name ought to come from themselves.

Many of these folk assert that they are in fact the real 'native' Americans. As an added twist, it seems that the only full, un-hyphenated Americans are those who make no claim of origin beyond the shores of this land. As John Trudell observed at the time, 'They change our name and treat us the same.' Basic to the treatment is an insistence that the original inhabitants of the land are not permitted to name themselves. So 'Native American' does not avoid the problem of naming from an outsider's perspective.Д¬oncern for political correctness focuses more on appearances than reality. 'Native' also has a pejorative meaning in English colonization, as in 'The natives are restless tonight.' From an English perspective (and, after all, we are talking about English words), 'native' carries the connotation of 'primitive,' which itself has both a generic definition, meaning 'first' or 'primary,' and a pejorative use, meaning 'backward' or 'ignorant.' And, as we have seen, 'American' derives from that other Italian. The word 'native' has a generic meaning, referring to anyone or anything that is at home in its place of origin. For the original inhabitants of the land, the 'correct' term became Native-American. Thus, African-American, Irish-American, Italian-American, and so on. Groups became identified as hyphen-American. There is an equally serious dilemma with the use of 'Native American,' which came into vogue as part of a concern for 'political correctness.' The latter was an effort to acknowledge ethnic diversity in the United States while insisting on an over-arching American unity. Some people get upset about 'American Indian' because of its association with Columbus. It is the legal definition of these Peoples in United States law. It is commonly used by many Indigenous Peoples in the United States, even today. On the other hand, why shouldn't we use it? Almost everybody in the world knows the name and to whom it refers. Why should we use any name given to a people by someone other than themselves? 2 It is a name given to people by outsiders, not by themselves. 'American Indians' derives from the colonizers' world-view and is therefore not the real name of anyone. So he named the people he met 'Indians.' The 'American' part would come later, after everyone but Columbus had admitted his error, and the land had been named for another Italian navigator, Amerigo Vespucci. Most of us know the story about how the Peoples of the 'new world' came to be called 'American Indians.' Columbus (his name gives away his secret: Cristobal Colon the Christian colonizer) thought he was going to India and, being a vain and self-important man, insisted he had found it. In the study of Indigenous Peoples, I don't want the question of names to slide by, to be taken-for-granted.

I want to provoke a critical awareness of history and culture. I chose it because I want people to think about names. Native American Indian Studies is a mouthful of a phrase. Native American Indian Studies - A Note on Names THIS WEBSITE HAS MIGRATED TO ANOTHER SERVER AS OF 1 JANUARY 2012:ДЄ Note on Names В© by Peter d'Errico, Legal Studies Department, University of Massachusetts

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