AZ Heard Museum using the term ‘American Indian’
20 Apr 2007 1 Comment
in Arizona News
The Heard museum, world renowned for highlighting the history and arts of tribes, decided to end its use of “Native Americans” when referring to tribes and will use the term “American Indian”. Jake James, a Phoenix resident who is Hopi/Gila River, is OK with American Indian because it “designates the Indian population of the United States,” said James, who is an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Community.
“For clarification, it’s a good step in the right direction. I just hope that in the future we would be called Americans,” James said.
However, there is not a united consensus for this decision and some legal scholars see today’s debate as a trend among tribes to find a correct name.
Apr 21, 2007 @ 09:00:28
The problem with applying “Native American” to the original inhabitants of the Americas is that anyone born with the United States is also a native American. IThe people we call American Indians are the descendants for East Euroasians who crossed the land bridge between Siberia and North America during the last ice age, but having crossed, they evolved to such an extent in continental isolation that they are regarded as a separate race. It would be improper to refer to them as Asian-Americans because they are genetically distinct from Asian-Americans.
An alternative used by many historians is to categorize them bylanguage group. Eskimo-Aleut (Alaska and parts of Canada), Na-Dene (Apache and Navjao) and Amerind (all other tribes of North, Central and South America). Some historians apply the term Amerindian to all tribes.