September 30, 2022
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Dissenting Opinions: The Complexity of Naming Things
George and Cole offer their thoughts on the "Indian" vs. "Native American" debate.
By: George Friedman and Cole Altom
Editor’s note: We at GPF are a group of (more or less) like-minded individuals writing for a common purpose – to make sense of the world. It’s a daunting job that makes it impossible for us to agree on everything, so rather than shrink from the task, we have decided to embrace the impossible by publishing Dissenting Opinions, a column that lays out what we disagree on and why. As always, your feedback is greatly appreciated.
Earlier this week, I wrote a piece that used the term “Indian.” An editor changed the term to “Native American.” I have no quarrel with my editor. An editor’s job is to correct defective terminology, and the use of Native American has become commonplace. Still, the correction caused me to think a bit about naming conventions in geopolitics.
The name “Indian” appears to have derived from a mistake made by Christopher Columbus, who accidentally touched down in the Americas when in fact he was trying to reach the “Indies,” the generalized term in Europe for parts of the easternmost stretches of Asia. Thinking he was where he intended to be, he called the people he encountered “Indians.” The name caught on and entered common usage. Thus, when I use the term “Indian,” people will understand who I’m talking about. In that sense, it is as useful an identifier as any.
For many, the term “Native American” is superior. But at the risk of being semantic, this has rhetorical problems of its own. First, the term “American” was coined by a German cartographer, the first to map out North America. He used the term America to honor who he believed to be the discoverer of America, or at least North America, an Italian named Amerigo Vespucci. To be “Native American,” then, is to be named after an Italian explorer. This hardly sheds the colonial baggage inherent to “Indian.”
The term “native” is also tricky. Native derives from the Latin concept of birth. I was born in Hungary, so I am a native Hungarian. No matter what else I do, that is my native country. Whoever was born in America – including all of the Americas – is Native American. Applying the term Native American to those Columbus referred to as Indian, then, changes the meaning of a word.
I am writing this column in Montreal, where indigenous peoples are often called “First Nations.” This is meant to mean that these nations preceded European settlement. The problem with this is that it is highly unlikely that these were first “nations.” In the course of millennia of history, the first nations were almost certainly destroyed by enemy nations, enslaved or absorbed by newer tribes, just as all nations were. It can be said that they preceded European occupation, but calling them First Nations may not be entirely accurate because, while there might be a nation tracing its history to the crossing from Asia, the term cannot possibly apply to all tribes.
Either way, the Indigenous peoples encountered by Europeans did not see themselves as belonging to a single race or nation. They were Comanche or Sioux, Inca or Aztec, and so on. Each person was a member of a nation, as is true of other continents, and they had names for the nations, a geography, a language and a religion. They knew what they were and what they were not.
The conquest of the Americas by Europeans isn’t especially unique. History from the Bible to Aristotle is filled with mentions of the occupation and annihilation of nations. These cannot be reversed. Today’s inhabitants of the ground formerly occupied by Babylonians are not the same nation.
The history of North America is as covered in war and annihilation as any other continent. Nations have been conquered and obliterated throughout history. European settlers committed these crimes, but so had the nations they discovered and conquered. No one is here without a crime in his history.
The real issue here is to challenge the legitimacy of European conquest by challenging the name European immigrants used. It’s unclear to me whether the challenge was issued by the heirs of Europeans seeking to delegitimize their history or the heirs of the nations that lived here and were conquered. Since any single word is as invalid as any other, it seems to me that the Indians, or Native Americans, or First Nations alone have the right to name themselves something else, and I have an obligation to use that name. I don’t think they would choose to name themselves after an Italian sailor.
George Friedman, founder and CEO
The problem with naming conventions – a problem to which George correctly alludes in his essay – is that they are less about names themselves and more about the circumstances under which the names were derived. The debate about what to call the North American peoples who were all but wiped out by European colonizers is really a debate about the act of conquest and how we reckon with the past. On that we agree.
In fact, many of George’s premises are self-evidently true. Yes, many of the nations populating North America fought each other well before the Europeans showed up. Yes, conquest and cultural annihilation were commonplace at a certain point in world history. Yes, it can be folly to judge the behavior of 500 years ago by the standards of today. Yes, it’s impossible to change the actions of the past. And yes, people generally understand whom you are referring to when you say “Indian” or “Native American” or “First Nation” or “Indigenous peoples.” That’s not the issue.
The issue is that all of these self-evidently true things are utterly irrelevant. Not one of them is exculpatory. When you clear the smoke and break the mirrors, what remains is the absolutely unassailable fact that genocide is bad, no matter when it happened, no matter who it happened to. It’s irresponsible and immoral to shrug off Caesar’s Gallic genocide as “shit happens,” just as it’s irresponsible and immoral to relegate Hitler’s genocide as “conquest is the way of the world, what of it?” George doesn’t say as much outright, of course, but his line of reasoning is, to me, uncomfortably close to those who would.
The result of this line of argumentation, deliberately or unconsciously, is to absolve modern Americans of past wrongdoings. Or, in George’s words, to “challenge the legitimacy of European conquest by challenging the name European immigrants used.” My response is: Yea, so what? It is absolutely fair to challenge the legitimacy of things. People of all political and cultural persuasions do it all the time. Why is this different? Why is this problematic? Why twist yourself into knots conjuring reasons to say it’s not OK? And who are we to say it’s OK or not OK in the first place?
To his credit, George even goes out of his way to say, “Since any single word is as invalid as any other, it seems to me that the Indians, or Native Americans, or First Nations alone have the right to name themselves something else, and I have an obligation to use that name.” But in arguing that all those names share the same utility as merely an identifying marker, that conquest is just the way things were done back then, and that all nations are inherently belligerent, he is unwittingly participating in one side of the debate while purporting not to.
To be clear, I don’t think we all have to spend the rest of eternity flagellating ourselves for the sins of the past. I just think we need to reckon with them, and if nothing else acknowledge them. It is literally the least we can do. To do otherwise is to rewrite history, which is bad. In the meantime, let’s stop adjudicating the accuracy of names. It’s not our place to do so.
