The Austin chapter of The Barking Crow’s brain trust has been up in Montana this weekend (shoutout to Black Coffee Roasting Company in Missoula, which is our office for the morning before we hit the airport) and, being in Lewis & Clark territory, everything is named after an Indian tribe. Which reminds me that my wife—it’s nice having a social worker for a wife, you’re always up to date on the politically correct terminology—recently reported that “American Indian” is coming back into vogue instead of “Native American” as the phrase describing the peoples of the Blackfeet, Shoshone, Crow, Cheyenne, and 570 other federally recognized tribes in the United States. Which provokes a clear question here, which is: Is this coming from people who identify as American Indian or is this the Latinx thing again?
There is, at least at a level public enough to reach Google, little polling on the matter. Which might be good. Given the American Indian population is experiencing poverty at three times the rate of white Americans, the question of which broad-brushed identifier is currently preferred is low on the list of pressing issues affecting this part of our country. The question calls to mind the time the national media descended on Red Mesa High School on Navajo Nation, asked, “How do you feel about your school’s athletic teams having ‘Redskins’ as their official nickname?” and were told, more or less, “There’s uranium in our drinking water.” (Then, the national media went and got a statement from Dan Snyder and moved on with its week. No word on how the uranium situation is going.)
So, while the Smithsonian reports that the consensus is to try to use individual tribe names if you’re someone who likes calling people the thing they want to be called (as opposed to someone who likes calling people things other than what they want to be called, for reasons of…let’s move on), the terminology isn’t the most important thing in this sphere. It’s good, of course, to call people by their preferred names. That is a kind thing to do, and asking isn’t wrong. It just shouldn’t be the only question. There’s uranium in the drinking water.
