This New York Times story caught my eye today because of the the linguistic choices in the headline — “US Agrees to $3 Billion Deal in Indian Trust Suit” — as well as many within the story’s body. Some examples of the latter:

The tentative agreement, reached late Monday between Obama administration negotiators and lawyers for some 300,000 individual American Indians[…]

“This is an historic, positive development for Indian country[…]” said Ken Salazar, the Interior Department secretary[….]

Under the settlement agreement, the government would pay $1.4 billion to compensate the Indians[…]

It struck me as odd that the author and those quoted throughout used the bolded terms, and I wanted to explore and attempt to explain that odd feeling. Am I alone here? It feels intuitive to me that the more acceptable term is “Native American.” Maybe that’s now out of date? But why would “American Indian” replace “Native American” as the more racially considerate option? Wikipedia tells me the following: “At the United Nations Conference on Indians in the Americas, representatives of many Nations and tribes collectively decided to call themselves American Indians.” I can’t possibly understand why, but fair enough; it doesn’t matter if I understand it, it’s their choice. But did the author of the NYT piece make sure that the tribes involved in the settlements were the ones who came to that decision?

Perhaps it’s a bit simpler: the author’s linguistic choice stems from the ancient system this deal is related to, the “Indian Trust” system, enshrined in 1887. But if that were the case, I’d expect the author to limit his uses of “Indian” to direct references to the Indian Trust system, rather than adopting the terminology for the duration of the piece. But again, I could be wrong.

Believe me, I’m not trying to be uptight here, but this is the intersection of politics and race — always the scene of some tricky discourse. Just ask our bi-racial (or is it mixed race?) President Barack Obama, who, the article claims, “had pledged to American Indians that he would work to resolve the lawsuit if he were elected.” Did our liberal President really use that term? It’s not a direct quote, so it’s hard to say. But this fascinates me. I’m legitimately amazed that it’s no big deal to refer to descendants of tribes who lived on the American continent before we did as “Indians.” It seems ignorant to me. I’ve always thought that it was something like calling blacks “colored people” or Asians “Orientals.” I also feel instinctively that it must be more okay for “American Indians” to self-identify that way, if they choose to, than for an outsider to use the term. I wouldn’t have expected it from a news source as politically correct as the New York Times, at least; but again, I don’t know.

As for our leaders, it’s likely that assessing this racial referent is not high on their priority list, and that’s probably why they don’t think twice about using it: it just doesn’t matter anymore. “American Indians” are not very politically salient — there’s no Congressional American Indian Caucus. Besides, what does changing the nomenclature even do? Yeah, they could go with “Native Americans”, or devise something new like “Original Americans” or “The Previous Americans.” But those names would only be unpleasant reminders of that period of genocide and colonization which we Real Americans have systematically expunged from our collective memory.

Let’s just stick with “American Indians.”

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Tags: language & grammar, race & culture // 3 Comments »