CNN calls Native Americans "Something Else"

a reply to: galaga
This is the whole point of the thread. I'm not surprised that you missed it.

a reply to: galaga
I guess the last part of your post about Native American inventors was supposed to make Native people out to be primitive savages. Well here are a list of inventions that Native people developed that we're still using today.

Rubber
Kayaks
Snow goggles
Cable suspension bridges
Raised-bed agriculture
Baby bottles
Anesthetics and topical pain relievers
Syringes
Hammocks
Oral contraceptive
Mouthwash

The inventors are lost to time because they were developed before European invasion.
This doesn't even include the food we eat to this day.

Regarding Native Americans in the media, I came across this article/photo essay by Tritan Ahtone and Daniella Zalcman in the National Geographic magazine (December 2018, followed by another article on Native American caricatures and invisibility in the US: altogether, pages 102-120).

Linky: www.nationalgeographic.com...

What was quite interesting was that the Polynesians were included among the tribes, considering that once Anthropology was so territorial, it wouldn't even class the Inuit as "Native American", when today it seems more likely that the Native Americans/First Nations, the Inuit and Polynesians all had some contact and inter-marriage long before Columbus. So it says under one photo: "Hannah Tomeo, of the Colville, Yakima, Nez Perce (sic.), Sioux and Samoan tribes is a sophomore standout at Portland State University in Oregon".

Well, nice to see the Nat Geo is redeeming itself a bit, after it profited for many decades by depicting tribal peoples almost exclusively as the "exotic other".

Among pipe-smoking Western Anthropologists, that would have once been considered academic heresy!

Not only that but in my youth children's books about "American Indians" almost exclusively discussed those in the US, almost as if they had some kind of pre-Columbian ethnic wall around them, and thus without any fault of their own some North American indigenous nations became the representatives of Anglo-US imperialism. OK, in the 1980's there were some books on the Incas, the Aztecs or the Amazon Indians, but these were never framed as specifically "American", and it was so confusing I recall schoolyard fights on whether these were in fact the same people, or completely different. And most of "Spanish America" was never discussed at all. And still today groups like the Charrua, the Mapuche, the Selknam or the Taino are pretty much considered more "specialized" knowledge. Yet they're all "American" in a Geo-political sense.

But then one could ask, as far as current identity is concerned, what are the limits?
In the history forum, for example, I had a thread and documentary on the "Deutschamerikaner" (the German-Americans), and many of the German and Scandinavian immigrants to the US and Canada were not aiming to stay in urban ethnic ghettos unlike other groups (the East European Jews, or Italians for example). Many wanted to go to rural areas that resembled their homelands. And the documentary in that thread says many did mix with the local Native Americans.

Of course, most German identity and language was lost with World War I, and many gave up their language and even changed their names (slogans like "Hell is too good for the Hun", were common at the time).

In the communist East Germany or GDR (post-World War II) the communists first encouraged "hobby Indianism", during which groups of "Indianists" painstaking re-created the American West, spurred on by local "Indianer-films" (in which the natives were the heroes against US imperialism), and the fact that GDR citizens couldn't travel abroad. Therefore they decided to recreate the American West at home.

However, in the 1970's real Native Americans were invited to the GDR for pow-wows and events, which began to cause problems, since many of these were also environmentalists, and contrary to popular belief, the communists weren't big on environmentalism. And suddenly these hobby groups were persecuted for fraternizing with the US "class enemy" (Indian or not). But when the wall fell and erstwhile GDR Germans could make their pilgrimage to the real Indians in the "Wild West" some were very disappointed, but others were accepted and stayed on.

So, all that considered could one say for example, this person is from the Lakota-German tribes?
Or more specifically (the Germans themselves still regionally and linguistically diverse), for example, the Lakota-Bavarian tribe?
Or are Europeans (even if mixed German/Native American ancestry) automatically excluded by dint of their color or race?

(PS. And there is also a history of Native Americans who either stayed or mixed in Germany. Some were sailors maybe, some part of dance troupes, and some simply traveled or were spouses of returning Germans. Then there were US soldiers stationed in still-occupied Germany. A lot more historical research should be done, but let's say the movement of DNA wasn't just a one-way street.)

Or is the cut-off for "tribal" or not rather more akin to people who may have been in contact before Columbus, such as nowadays less disputed - the Amerindians and the Polynesians?

Well the Vikings were provably around before Columbus.

Or are we including all the indigenous peoples of lands the US colonized?
In that sense "American" may or may not have anything to do with ancestral connections, but rather a common struggle against land theft and imperialism.
That would then also include the Hawaiians.
The Philippines?
Occupied "West" Germany?

Or is it simply groups who still identify as "tribal" today, and have been similarly "othered" by the Western gaze?
Although I doubt, for example, that Samoa is one single tribe. (They're not, and in fact they are currently three territories.)
And then some nationalist/independence groups (in Hawaii, for example), probably wouldn't want anything "American" attached to their tribal heritage whatsoever.

Then things get even more confusing.

When Vanilla Ice claimed to be Choctaw descent, it seems the Choctaws actually checked out his claims, found them false (at least the "grandmother" claims, he could still have Native DNA somewhere) but came to the following startling conclusion:

"There’s a vast difference in self-identifying as a Native American person and being a member of a federally recognized tribe,” added Alicia Seyler, an attorney who also is a Choctaw citizen.

www.indianz.com...

So it seems the Native nations don't really want to get into an argument as to how people identify.
They didn't yell: "Fraud!"
I mean nowadays with gender-fluid identities ...
But they still want to keep one caveat (understandably) - keep identity apart from what has legal weight, like being a member of a federally recognized tribe.

originally posted by: Skid Mark
a reply to: galaga
This is the whole point of the thread. I'm not surprised that you missed it.

Check out the irony..

Black Cloud