Reply to Can you be a native of America/United States of America if you are not Native American?

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Reply to "Can you be a native of America/United States of America if you are not Native American?"

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[quote=Anonymous]Simply put, native means "pertaining to birth" and anyone born in a country (whether they are occupying it or not) are natives of that country. Our country is not technically called America, but is rather the United States of America. So one would be a United States of American Native. But since we shorten that to America often, and call ourselves Americans, we could say native American (note that native is not capitalized in this instance).

A better term for the Native Americans would be Aboriginal Americans, just as Aboriginal Australians are called such. If we used that term here, there'd be no confusion. The other confusion with Native Americans is calling them Indians, a term I do use normally for the population. It's as if Americans deep down psychologically want to apply a name to the aboriginal tribes which is confused with others, as if they don't want them to be distinct.

But back to us being American natives, we should be able to use that term just as well as French native is used, even though the Franks only invaded France about 1600 years ago. And likewise English native (invaded about same time as the Franks), Scottish native (invaded about 1300 years ago, German native (invaded about 1800 years ago), Turkish native (invaded about 600 years ago), etc.

Now, another point is the illogical thought processes which comes to peoples' minds when they decide to play with words. If I were Native American, and did not like the term Indian, I certainly wouldn't say I was a Native of a place of which the name was European, as America is a European name. In lieu of using a term which was the name of the land for only one tribe, and since the overwhelmingly common spoken language is European, I would say something like Native Westerners or Native Occidentals.

That's right, I don't believe a word like Oriental is racist, when the word literally means "pertaining to the East or Rising". Asian is a much worse term because it comes from the name of the area at the very western part of Asia (modern Turkey), and why would those of the east prefer to define themselves as being from the westernmost part of the continent, the small area which borders Europe?
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