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EXPLANATORY JOURNALISM: The TerryReport
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News, commentary, opinion on politics, government, books, social trends, American life, travel, cycling, books, other stuff
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Sometime in the last years 30 years or so, the term “native Americans” took over as the polite way to say Indians. The name Indian, as we all know from attending grade school, was given to America’s original peoples by European explorers who were looking for a route to India and thought they had found it when they stumbled onto the American land mass. Indian is a somewhat silly misnomer, but it stuck. The victors, in this case the European settlers, had the last word.
Native Americans, however, turns out to be a poor designation also, no matter how much those who use it are trying to be respectful. The original Americans were immigrants to this country, too. They got here much, much earlier than the white settlers from Europe, but they are immigrants just the same. For a long time, it was believed they came here over a landbridge to Alaska more than 10,000 years ago. New, more recent information has tended to move the date of their arrival back to as much as 20,000 years previous, but they would still have been immigrants from Asia. So what’s this “native” stuff about?
It turns out that calling the Indians “native” is a slur against the rest of us. I am a native American. I was born here. So were a long line of my ancestors, but, at 200 to 400 years long, that line is short compared to the original American settlers. It is my tribe, my ethnic heritage, that is not native to this country. In trying to do something right by the original Americans, we are doing something wrong by the rest of us.
Turn the question around: if I am not a native American, where am I native to? Where in the world can I claim as my rightful home? This is an important question, because there are many people who believe that white, European Americans should be classified as invader Americans. They believe we have no right to the country of our birth, that we must open the doors very wide to immigrants from around the world to the point where the country is no longer what it has been in over the last 300 to 400 years. Some believe that anyone in the world has as much right to be here and those who were born here.
The term native American was an academic construct, one that came out of our colleges and universities and it rose to prominence following the Civil Rights revolution and that of the many cultural changes, including the women’s movement, that rocked this country from the 1960s through the 1970s (and continues to this day, in various forms). As such, it was supported by some people who wish to condemn the creation of the nation and who believe that there was an actual, provable, genocidal campaign against the original Americans. (The latter point is very much in dispute and I, for one, don’t subscribe to it, based on my study of American history. More on that at a later time.)
The idea of debating what we should call the original peoples of this continent falls right in line with the roaring debate about calling the Washington football team The Redskins. Being ever so polite and proper, those who take the position that Redskins is a slur turn around and use a lesser slur against the rest of us: native Americans.
Shouldn’t we try to get this right, all the way around? If the ownership of the team is not allowed to call them Redskins, then what about all the other uses of Indian names, history and culture? While we are at it, let’s drop calling the original peoples native Americans, a term which has already fallen out of favor. Original Americans is better. Indians is something that most, in and out of their own community, accept as well. Whatever they want to be called, it shouldn’t be native Americans because that places the rest of us in a secondary position, one that calls into question with every utterance who is native and who is not. It makes the rest of us homeless.
Doug Terry, 6.1.14
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Courtland Milloy, a columnist in the Washington Post:
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To my friends who still embrace the Washington football team, especially those with whom I huddled in front of television sets on many a game day, do not be fooled. The fight over the team’s name is not some politically correct reflex to overly sensitive Native Americans, as Snyder (the owner) would have you believe.
It is a rallying point, symbolic of a larger struggle against the most pernicious and enduring kind of American exploitation, racism in service to capitalism, the truly shameful principles upon which the nation was founded. To carry out the genocide of Native Americans and enslave Africans to work stolen lands white capitalists facilitated the portrayal of both groups as less than human.
Respect, dignity and justice for all, that’s what the fight is about.
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A personal note: YIKES! It is most distressing to me that Milloy chooses to put this argument about the team name in these terms. The worst part is that he says the name is part of the “truly shameful principles upon which this nation was founded”, choosing to ignore the higher principles, which have saved us repeatedly, in favor of the worst aspects of the settlers behavior and, in the case of slavery, official behavior at that. His argument is also just factually wrong. The wars with the original Americans were not drawn from “principles”, but from the clash of civilizations which, in any case, was bound to happen in some degree no matter who entered this continent nor how they might have wished to make peace or conduct themselves. It is certainly possible to imagine settlers from other parts of the world coming to North America and, literally, killing every person here. (That doesn’t excuse the conduct of our ancestors, but, hey, let’s keep things in perspective, what say?)
The issue of the treatment of the original Americans has been a lifelong concern of mine. As a history major in college, I made a concerted effort to learn details and to study the various massacres of the Indians, which, as far as I could tell, far exceeded the number of massacres of white settlers, at least in terms of total numbers killed. It is a sad, bloody and unfortunate part of American history, but it does not support the charge of genocide, at least in my mind and that of many scholars in the field. (There were clearly those of genocidal intent, including the much famed Kit Carson, a perfect murderer if there ever was one.)
The American settlers were following the pattern of the world up to that point: if you wanted something and other people wanted it, too, you went to war and killed enough of the enemy so that those who opposed you had no choice by to give in. When the European settlers pressed forward into the plains areas, their lone settlements were often attacked, with everyone killed and vile trophies taken. This was in no way seen as wrong or immoral, it was, instead, seen as the only way of life they had known. The original Americans were also following their own history and patterns. They were not saints, but people who wanted the whites out. They had fought vicious wars with each other long before the Europeans arrived.
Doug Terry, 6.1.14
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to go to recent posts, nearly 300 pages of news and comments filed during the first nine months of 2013 and during the critical election year of 2012.
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to go back to prior years (500+ pages) of The TerryReport
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