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Originally Posted by GlassCity
Are you saying indigenous people want to call themselves indigenous?
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Some of them do and some of them don't. I've discussed this on here before and it's one of the few areas where I'm generally willing to offend aborindigenatindians: they have too much disagreement over what to call themselves. But unlike a lot of people I do understand the reason why.
Quote:
Originally Posted by GlassCity
If so, maybe I just haven't paid enough attention, and admittedly my sample size is small. And if so, why do you predict another term to become preferred soon?
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Because the answer to the question of "who are we, the descendants of the original inhabitants of North America, as a group; what is our identity" is in constant flux, and which demonym they prefer or which aspect of that demonym they prefer varies significantly not just between communities but between individuals, and that is why we have native people who hate the term native and call themselves Indians, Indians who complain that that term Indian is racist and they should be called aboriginals, aboriginals who decry the term aboriginal as a colonial definition and prefer indigenous, indigenous people who find the whole argument too absurd and prefer to just be called native and then there are those who never use any of those terms because they're all English words and instead call themselves by their endonym, which in my family's case is Anishnawbe.
The problem is really that we're trying to take dozens of cultures, many of which are wildly different from the others (there are few similarities between the Miqmac and the Squamish and the Inuit) and address them all collectively as a bloc. There will never be nationwide agreement on anything among aborindigenatindians because there are over 600 communities of them and they have several dozen different cultures. The best we could have done was to do what Europeans, Asians and Africans have done and call them Americans but we can't actually do that because a single country expropriated that term!
Quote:
Originally Posted by optimusREIM
Thing is that native and indigenous mean the same thing. Only difference is one is half the length.
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The difference is the degree of ambiguity. "Native Canadian" can be interpreted as meaning anyone born here. An Asian-Canadian, born to Asian parents in Canada, can be considered "native" because they were born here. (The word "native" comes from the Latin "nativus" or "of this place by birth"). The term indigenous, on the other hand, has no ambiguity. It means descendants of the people who have centuries old connections to this land. Ojibwe are Indigenous to North America; Tibetans are Indigenous to Asia; Bretons are Indigenous to Europe. An African can be "native born" in Breton but he can't be Indigenous there.