[OT] Inuit? Eskimo?

[Floyd Davidson]

Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters <mertz at gnosis.cx> wrote:
>anton at vredegoor.doge.nl (Anton Vredegoor) wrote previously:
>|>    "Native American" is to "American Indian" as ______ is to "Eskimo".
>|>Anyone in the .ca domain care to educate the .us folks?
>|To my (eu-domain) eye the use of "American Indian" instead of "Indian
>|American" is strange.
>
>Incidentally, in Canada, "First Nations" is generally used rather than
>"Native American."  But in either case, Native Americans themselves are
>quite split--as would be any group of people when it comes to
>politics--over best names.  In a lot of cases, when referring to a
>particular person, naming her particular nation and tribe (Navaho, Oglala
>Sioux, etc.) is better.  But lots of NAs themselves prefer "Indian" as a
>term.

The term "Native American" is a coined word that the US Federal
government came up with to reference *all* indigenous people in
the US and its territories.  Hence it includes American Indians,
Eskimos, Aleuts, Hawaiians, Puerto Ricans, Guamanians, American
Somoans and probably somebody I've forgotten to name.

It obviously can't mean anyone who is Canadian, by definition.

>Probably an influence on the names is that Canada has a much larger
>percentage of Indian immigrants (i.e. from India) than does the US--or
>their families of 2nd or 3rd generation.  The name "Indian" quite apart
>from coming from a 500 year old mistake, refers to a quite different
>large group of Canadians.  Not that Indian-Americans are a rarity in the
>USA either, but we USAians are really quite thick in the head, as a
>rule.
>
>Yours, Lulu...

Another oddity with naming conventions came up about a dozen
years ago.  If my memory serves, it was a meeting in regard to
education, and involved the Bureau of Indian Affairs or
whatever, but it was a national symposium of Native people...
and when they had to choose a set of terms, they ran into a
problem.  Seems that there was obstinate opposition to the term
"native" by many Lower-48 Indian groups, yet Alaskans absolutely
insisted that the *only* way to reference all of the people
indigenous to Alaska was to use the term Native.  Hence, they
adopted the phrase "American Indian and Alaska Native peoples".

You'll find that phrase has been widely adopted by the US
Federal government when it refers specifically to that group of
people, as opposed to the wider significance of the term Native
American.

(Boy, any of those Lower-48 folks who don't think there's any
difference between Canadians and USAians, really ought to try
talking about this subject...  it'll cure 'em of such a notion!)

-- 
Floyd L. Davidson           <http://web.newsguy.com/floyd_davidson>
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska)                         floyd at barrow.com