Yup, there's a problem. Indigenous People's Day is a long overdue recognition but it comes in the form of something so politically-correct, it's not even clear what it means. Who were the indigenous people ... the first ones to get here, the next wave, etc. They didn't all walk over the Bering Strait land crossing and then ... poof ... America was full of native Americans ... but none of them started out here. If you're wanting to be so politically-correct then maybe you aren't recognizing there were no indigenous people in America. All of us came from somewhere else.
There is no intention to denigrate the claim of native Americans to the land where they once roamed freely. The only question is who are they. There's also no intention to include Europeans as immigrants in the same context as the ones who walked here thousands of years earlier, before anyone else was here.
The general thinking is the migration into the Americas took place over a Bering land bridge about twenty-five to thirty thousand years ago. There is also credible evidence of people arriving by sea on the West coast. They may have landed as well by sailing from Africa and landing on the East coast.
The only ones with a fair claim to call themselves native Americans are ones who have prehistoric (i.e. pre-Christian) history here. They took the land when it was empty and, by any right of a claim to land the world has ever observed, that was the first valid claim and the one which legally stands.
So those were the indigenous people but the day needs a name which does not suck. Indigenous sounds like something in your intestine. See, it goes in yer indigenous and out from yer outdigenous where it goes ... who cares where it goes after that.
Here at the Rockhouse, we're still not sure why American Indian is regarded as a pejorative term. American Indians are one of a kind in the world and there's deserved pride in that. Castro the Pool Shark was a guy I met in Basic Training and he told me himself he has Indian blood. He told me that proudly and why not. You would do better to concentrate on your game rather than whether he is an Indian. If you're going to play Castro the Pool Shark, you need to be good. He was a great guy and he didn't really shark anyone but he would murder you on a pool table.
Where 'redskin' is clearly offensive, 'American Indian,' to my knowledge, is not and I'm really not sure why the politically-correct nomenclature changed.
Confirmation: Russell Means loathes the term 'native American' and prefers 'American Indian' so that settles it for me. There's no offense in it.
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