What's in a Name?

Our recent trip out west made me think about the name “Indian”. From Rapid City, South Dakota through New Mexico and Arizona, I didn’t see much of the term “Native American”. Our tour guides, the Trading Posts and the Crazy Horse Memorial’s Indian Museum of North America overwhelmingly used the term Indian. It got me to thinking: what’s this all about?

This problem isn’t entirely new to me. Until my first trip to Canada, I glibly referred to myself as an American. That ended when I paused at the Canadian border gate and asked the attendant where I could convert my American money. He pulled out some Canadian bills and informed me that “this” was American money too. Wow, now I was nervous about what to call the money in my pockets. I quickly settled on “US money”.

With that settled, I started doubting all of it. Should I now think of myself as a “US-er"? It’s just not fair. All the other countries in this hemisphere have sensible names like Mexico and Argentina. What in the world were our founders thinking? They must have been so concerned about life, liberty and the pursuit… that they paid no attention to the name. We ended up with great founding documents and a clumsy name.

It all started innocently enough. We start with a collection of names like Virginia and New York and yearn for the simplicity of calling the whole group by one name. Well, I guess the United States was a functional start—must have been an engineer or a German. We then realize that there may be other “United States” in the world so we quickly add that this group is in the Americas (I’m surprised we didn’t go for the United States of North America). Since none of us like to say too many words when referring to something, it was quickly abbreviated to America. And there you have it—the problem.

A similar thing seems to have happened to the American Indian—although this one’s somewhat reversed. Legend has it that Christopher Columbus coined the description. He had no idea that he’d just met people divided into many tribes throughout the Americas. This could have been a quite handy mistake for the rest of us. Had he known that he’d just met members of the Taino tribe and then had gone on to become of aware of the Tekesta and the Jeaga and so on, he may have come up with a Rube Goldberg concoction like the US of A. So serendipity simplified things for us right at the beginning.

But there were problems. The real Indians, from India, started moving to the Americas to run motels and become physicians. So now we have a problem. How do we distinguish between these two peoples? And that’s only the beginning because some Indians are from the East Indies, the West Indies and even the Indian Union. Columbus started out doing us a favor but only if he had come up with some name that wasn’t already in use! I understand that the Australians (who always beat us out of the Cup*) are so glad that some Indian sailing south to get to Russia didn’t accidentally discover the Aborigines. They would have been dubbed Russians. The upside is that, like us, the Aussies may have been too busy to pay any attention to the Cup.

Growing up as a US-er, I heard of the Indians-of-the-Americas first. Therefore they were the real ones. When I heard of the others I knew we were in trouble. But later, the learned among us came up with “Native American” and I thought that we had a solution. The learned then told us that not only was this convenient but that we must change our ways because the term Indian was pejorative and that the Choctaw and the others didn’t want to be called Indians.

With this new term, US of A became comprised of the Native Americans, the Indians and the rest of us. But the learned went on to tell us that we all had to become “something American”. This meant we had Native Americans, Indian Americans, Bhutan Americans and so on. Oh no, now we’re back to complicating. Everyone has two names and the Native Americans might end up with two different “something American” names. To make it even more complicated, we find that the Native Americans aren’t native at all but had simply come here before everyone else. I don’t know where they came from, maybe Siberia. If so how do we distinguish the Siberian Americans (formerly Indians) from the real Siberian Americans. Have we come full circle?

Oh and to make a short story long, I found a Hong Kong Canadian who exchanged my money.

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* Coincidence? The rise of Political Correctness and the Australian upset in the America’s Cup was both in the early 1980s.