1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [197]
Historically speaking, both “Indian” and “Native American” are remote from the way America’s first peoples thought about themselves. Much as the inhabitants of the tenth-century Carolingian Empire did not describe themselves as “Europeans,” a name coined in the seventeenth century, the inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere in that same era did not think in terms of “Indians,” “Native Americans,” or any other collective hemispheric entity. Instead they regarded themselves as belonging to their immediate group—the Patuxet village in the Wampanoag confederation, for instance.
To a considerable extent, the same holds true today. When Russell Thornton, the UCLA anthropologist, kindly sent me some copies of his work, he enclosed his curriculum vitae, which identified him as a “registered member of the Cherokee Nation,” not as an Indian, Native American, Amerindian, or indigenous person. When I mentioned this to Thornton, he responded that only one experience united the diverse peoples of the Americas: being flattened by European incursions. “‘Indians’ or ‘Native Americans’ as a category both owe their existence to Europe,” he said.
For all these reasons, this book uses “Indian” and “Native American” interchangeably, with the latter serving mainly to avoid repetition.
Note, though, that I use these terms as cultural and geographical categories, not racial ones. “Indian” is the Western Hemisphere’s equivalent to “European,” not to “white” or “Caucasian.” Racial categories are inevitably problematic, because they are ostensibly biological—that is, they are supposed to be based on heritable physical characteristics like skin color—but in fact are heavily cultural, as demonstrated by the infamous “one drop” rule in the nineteenth-century southern United States, which proclaimed that men and women were Negroes, even when they could not be distinguished by whites from appearance, if any of their ancestors, no matter how remote, were African. Avoiding such inconsistency and ambiguity is easier if one eschews categorizing by race, which I have tried to do, except for the occasional rhetorical flourish.
In referring to particular groups of Indians—the Wampanoag or the Maya—I use a simple rule of thumb: I try to call groups by the name preferred by their members. This approach, which seems only courteous, is sometimes attacked as condescending. After all, the argument runs, people in the United States use the English labels “French” and “German” rather than français and Deutsch. To insist on using “proper” names for Indians is thus to place them in a special category of fragility. But this objection is not well thought out. Although English-speakers do speak of “Germans” rather than Deutscher, “French people” rather than les français, they tend to avoid insulting terms like “Kraut” and “Frog.” Many common names for Indian groups are equally insulting, or descended from such insults. Unsurprisingly, they are slowly being changed.
My “simple” rule of thumb to call people by the name they prefer is more complex than it may seem. The far north, for example, is home to a constellation of related societies generally known as “Eskimo,” but in the 1980s this term was replaced by “Inuit” in Canada, where most of these groups live, after complaints that “Eskimo” came from a pejorative term in Algonquian language that meant “eater of raw flesh.” Why this would be bothersome seems unclear, because raw meat is a preferred part of northerners’ diet, much as sushi is favored by the Japanese. In any case, linguists believe that “Eskimo” actually