Note on Nomenclature

Why Use “American Indians” in the Book Title?

During the initial preparation of this book, I grappled with the question of what the wording of its title should be. I had thought that use of “Native American” would be most accurate and respectful. But further research changed that view. The first was a mailing from the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian. When I visited its website, I discovered that, although its periodical magazine’s name had been changed in the Fall of 2004 from ‘(National Museum of the) AMERICAN INDIAN’ to ‘(National Museum of the American) INDIAN,’ the term American Indian was and continues to be used. Of course, within the detailed descriptions of the Museum’s purposes and its collections are found various other terms such as Native Americans, indigenous people, native peoples, and Indians.

In addition, Russell Means in his declaration “I am an American Indian, Not a Native American!” at an international conference of Indians from the Americas held in Geneva at the United Nations in 1977 stated that “we unanimously decided we would go under the term American Indian.”[i]

In his book Imagining Native America in Music Michael Pisani tells how he grappled with terminology, finding “it difficult to account for every inconsistency of nomenclature.”

While, for example, the label “Indian” has since Columbus’s time traditionally signified a particular group of people (first the misconstrued “Indians” and then all native peoples of the Americas) as perceived by another group (Europeans), “Indian” has been reclaimed today as a term of unity among many First Peoples.” (p. 5)

More recently, I received a mailing from a member of the Sicangu Lakota tribe and President of the American Indian College Fund seeking support for “American Indian students.”

Finally, “A Proclamation on Indigenous Peoples’ Day issued by the U.S. President on October 8, 2021, includes the term: “Since time immemorial, American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians have built vibrant and diverse cultures ….”[ii]

Although the terminology issue has not been resolved[iii], in consideration of the sources cited here, and because the term “Indian” has been used for centuries and which, not coincidentally, has been used extensively in both scholarly and popular written works, and because there are 574 federally recognized tribes and over “1,000 distinct tribal entities or nations” in North America (Muckle, p. 1), I concluded that an appropriate term in the title for this book would be American Indians. This term is used throughout the book.

[i] https://web.archive.org/web/20090503130744/http://www.peaknet.net/~aardvark/means.html

[ii] https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2021/10/08/a-proclamation-indigenous-peoples-day-2021/

[iii]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_name_controversy