In other words, they’re native to this land. This term emphasizes that hundreds of individual tribes inhabited the land now known as the United States of America before anyone else. “Native American” became the preferred “politically correct” terminology in the 1970s. There’s a reason why many states and regions now officially recognize and celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day instead of Columbus Day. government continues to use the term “American Indian” officially, many find “Indian” a painful reminder of the racism, violence, theft, and decimation of their people. Later, you probably learned of not just the flaws in Columbus’ reasoning - obviously, you can’t discover a place where people already live - but also the many atrocities he committed in his travels. You know, that intrepid explorer who claimed to have “discovered” America? He was so certain the “new” world he’d landed on was India that he called its people “Indios,” which later became “Indians.” You most likely heard a sanitized version of the Columbus story in elementary school. Before getting into whether one term is better than the other, let’s recap some history to help explain where these terms came from.
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