How the Native American population changed since the last census
usafacts.org
usafacts.org
We are pre-Constitutional sovereigns, recognized by our treaties with the U.S. and Canada. States like Michigan might force our teachers get "foreign language certificates," despite the fact that Michigan is a word from our language[0], but my children speak their language and our culture are pillars of strength and stability in our family. Blood quanta, problems of race in America, what to call us -- that's not our focus.
[0]https://www.interlochenpublicradio.org/michigan-education/20...
“We find that people who have taken a [mail in ancestry test] are not only more likely to self-identify as multiracial, they are particularly likely to select three or more races,” Johfre said. These differences were most pronounced for middle-age adults, which means the U.S. multiracial population would be growing because of more than just new births, the researchers noted.
https://news.stanford.edu/2021/05/17/ancestry-tests-affect-r...
Because that's quite different than Native Americans actually increasing as demographic groups...
My father actively downplayed his 1/16th Cherokee blood quantum -- and a lot of Natives are quite vocal about hating the whole idea of blood quantum, but that's probably more than people here want to know -- and I grew up in a house in the 'burbs bought the summer I turned three with his military mortgage benefits.
In the New York and northern New Jersey suburbs 67,000 mortgages were insured by the G.I. Bill, but fewer than 100 were taken out by non-whites.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.I._Bill
He never said much about his Native heritage. I think he did so to be white-passing in a world where lynchings still happened.
I am actively trying to learn about the cultural heritage I was denied apparently largely due to fear of violent white supremacists, basically.
Dismissing the interest in their heritage of people like me is just more erasure of Natives and Native culture. It actively reinforces racism in subtle ways. The subtlety helps make it insidious and hard to combat, unfortunately.
Speaking as someone who is also 1/32, same as you, people like us need to stop pretending having a sliver of genetic material somehow entitles us to a "cultural heritage". 1/32 is five generations. That's three percent. For comparison, the average European-American's DNA is 3.5% African. White people are blacker than you and me are Native American.
With that in mind, tying cultural heritage to "where did my close ancestors come from" seems like a more sensible approach than genetic percentages, since that actually connects to a social context.
Having said that, cherry picking one out of thirty-two great-great-great-grandparents over the thirty-one others sounds pretty absurd. But I'm not from North America so I probably miss some social context to understand the logic behind that.
It's a combinational effect of many minor causes stacking upon one another. People wanting to feel special. The feeling modern society is destroying the world and the sense Native American culture is the opposite of that. The mild but persistent impression that white heritage isn't something to celebrate or positively self-identify with.
But I do celebrate my Finnish heritage, as well as my Irish and English ancestry.
White supremacy as the label being used by "progressives" has nothing to do with the ideology other than in sharing a name. The label is just one of the many applied to those who dare to divert from the narrative, often used in situations where the "progressive" has talked herself into a corner from where there is no getting out other than by creating a path of labels to escape on.
I think it is better to only use the term "white supremacy" when describing the former. Don't use it as a label for something you find distasteful, only use it as a term for a specific ideology. The same goes for words like "fascism", "racism", all the "-phobias" and more. Take back the language from those [1] who have used it to drive their own narrative.
Heritage is actually a very common word used in modern klan and klan adjacent groups as they are very concerned with the racial purity of their lineage as well as the fact that they yearn for "the good 'ol days" of the antebellum south.
For hundreds of years, the idea of "whiteness" in America was used primarily to identify a group that for the most part had nothing exclusively in common except as that of oppressors.
Precisely. The breadth of Native American genetic and cultural diversity was every bit as large as that of Europeans, and compressing it into a single category has the same problems as compressing all the cultures constituting "white" into a single category. If your connection to your tiny fraction of native ancestry is so insubstantial you can't be more specific than "someone from north or south america", you're unfortunately just not a member of that culture.
Many white Americans are unsatisfied with not having a specific ancestral identity and hence play these games with distant ancestors.
The complaint two comments up about the "mild but persistent impression that white heritage isn't something to celebrate or positively self-identify with" is an even stronger one.
EDIT: downvote all you want, it doesn't take away the contradiction of insisting on hanging on to an identity of "whiteness" while denying the history behind it.
In the modern day, it has lost much of its explicitly racist connotations (except, obviously, when explicitly used in the original context by racists,) but just tends to mean "a person who looks white (until proven otherwise)" or "of European descent," the former of which isn't really related to culture, and the latter being so vague as to be useless as a cultural referent.
Isn't black exactly the same thing? A completely madeup racial category invented by white slavers to conveniently deny a group their humanity? And isn't it further possible that, after these racial groups were invented, actually real cultural identities began forming around them to the point where the invented categories had reified into something kinda real?
The "kinda" in that sentence is doing a lot of heavy lifting. It's a "real" social construct. It's not "real" in the sense of representing "real" human nature, or a "real" order of how things ought to be, which is how that social construct is wielded in practice.
Thinking differently -
5 generations is also (assuming childbirth at 25 and not carefully auditing for off-by-ones):
1 generation of 1:1 mix, 4 generations ago (b. 1897)
1 generation of 1:2 mix, 3 generations ago (b. 1922)
1 generation of 1:3 mix, 2 generations ago (b. 1947)
1 generation of 1:4 mix, 1 generations ago (b. 1972)
1 generation of 1:5 mix, now. (b. 1997)
In other words - 50% of your parenting influence descends from 4 generations of mixed marriages, and the entire mixed lineage begins approx ~100 years ago where it certainly would be a huge factor in daily life. It's quite possible that you may have even met the original couple or their immediate children, and very likely that you met or had extended contact with the 25% generation who in turn almost certainly was extremely impacted by the preceding 2 generations.
Pretty sure there is some cultural trace either overtly or in the form of inherited scars.
The reason many mixed don't know much about their fraction is because their ancestors were put in indian schools and married off to anglo settlers or any number of other far worse 'ethnic cleansing' atrocities. Whatever in-depth discussion remained was likely suppressed or downplayed to facilitate assimilation, leaving only hints and impressions behind in the people. At this point there is no way for them to know anything more about their past even if they wanted to.
pretending it's nothing only makes it worse and grows the divide to the past - which itself is a shift away from native views of history and connectedness to ancestors
Of course Native American isn’t a single ethnicity either, but you might be able to trace that back to say Inuit and actually have a specific culture to identify with. Where being say 1/16th black tells you little to nothing about the culture of that part of your ancestry.
That said, I don't like when people ask me where I grew up because I immediately feel judged for something I had no say in.
The only tribe I ever hear this brought up about is Cherokee lol
At something like the 1/16th level, it doesn't mean anything anyway (not even to white supremacists, but much less so as a real heritage). A heritage is the shared experiences, raising, and cultural connection, not about some miniscule bloodline/dna.
Unless we're talking about isolated inter-breeding populations, almost all people several 1/16ths of one or another ethnicity, that they have absolutely no connection with in any way (or ever cared about).
Your dismissive attitude is entirely inappropriate. I think it is commendable to be interested in learning about the parts of your family history that may have been suppressed out of racism or fear or racist retaliation.
There are many reasons why these stories aren't passd on (often is is just that younger generations don't ask enough questions) but there is no reason not to take Doreen at her word about why her didn't talk about that part of the family tree much.
There certainly is no call to belittle people's interest in their heritages and family history, especially when they could learn stories about their family history that might be lost.
I sincerely advise to to ask any older living relatives to tell you what they can about your great grandparents (and consider recording those stories). You might not care now, but those stories do disappear with time and you or future generations of your family could find them very valuable.
I think my great grandmother lived until I was somewhere in my teens. I inherited her TV when she died. I've still forgotten her name. Does it really matter? In the end we'll all be forgotten, and that is fine, because once you're dead you're gone. I wouldn't want my descendants to keep looking back, they should be looking forward.
> There are many reasons why these stories aren't passd on (often is is just that younger generations don't ask enough questions) but there is no reason not to take Doreen at her word about why her didn't talk about that part of the family tree much.
In your opinion, what would be the cut-off for "important" family history? How many dead and gone generations should we expect younger generations to remember?
I'm not saying Doreen is lying, I'm just saying that history naturally fades (unless you're Jesus or Hitler or something. Even then truth and myth will blur over time) and there usually isn't anything nefarious about that. Perhaps she's reading too much in it. With every generation you go back your number of new ancestors doubles (up to some point). Some of those people will be boring. Others maybe weren't interested in their family history (such as myself) and will effectively be a dead end.
> There certainly is no call to belittle people's interest in their heritages and family history, especially when they could learn stories about their family history that might be lost.
I think very few would object to people being interested in their family history (although some might find it a frivolous pursuit). It's the word "heritage" that makes me roll my eyes. If something wasn't part of your upbringing, then to me it's not part of your heritage.
> I sincerely advise to to ask any older living relatives to tell you what they can about your great grandparents (and consider recording those stories). You might not care now, but those stories do disappear with time and you or future generations of your family could find them very valuable.
Saving myself a lot of time now at the cost of potentially disappointing a curious member of a future generation seems like a good trade-off. Doubly so when it possibly prevents them from claiming a "heritage".
Not to be too rude about it, but everybody outside the US hates it. Go to any European forum and see how they roll their eyes when an American says "I'm half Irish, quarter Norwegian and 342/2636ths Italian."
There's a tendency to treat ethnicity as a clothing accessory rather than a culture.
It's also incredibly racist, when you get down to it. Does a white person need to be able to trace their lineage to claim they are white, or any other race, for that matter?
When you talk to Cherokee people, most of them are very clear that if you are part of the Cherokee culture, you're Cherokee. Throughout history, they have 'adopted' people of other races into their tribes, and those people married and had children. If an adopted white man married and adopted white woman, their children would be considered full blood, regardless of their skin color. So from a Cherokee perspective (and I assume any tribes that behaved similarly) the measure of a Cherokee is whether they are a part of the Cherokee culture, rather than what their genealogy shows.
More people are proud to proclaim being First Nations people.
And when someone is called out for this the inevitable response is "blood quantum is deeply offensive" crap which misses the whole point. If you sever ties with a culture for many generations you cease to be that culture. Someone who's great^N granddaddy banged a slave is no more African than an Nth generation American is <insert European culture here>
... the great grandchild of a slave?
if that were me i'd have many questions about the situation and how it impacted the next generation, etc.
this is the problem with dismissal -
it facilitates or accelerates the process of suppressing the history.
It's hard to figure out how to publicly engage with someone I don't know on what is inevitably a touchy subject, so I try hard to not be one of those white assholes making demands. I try to listen and absorb instead of inserting myself. But I feel like listening to actual Natives is one of the better things I can do to learn about Natives.
I follow some Reddits. I read articles.
I keep notes and periodically try to do a little writing for my own edification, to help me process the info. Because there are two parts to the equation: someone "talking" and someone listening and it can be hard to clearly understand something when a lifetime of bias and what not is garbling your perception. I've done a lot of therapy and I'm familiar with the process of taking some time to let it sink in and become clearer to me what I'm looking at as opposed to what I'm projecting onto it.
In the theory under which “race” is meaningful, it is biological and distinct from (and orthogonal to) social “ethnic” categories, so claiming race on that basis is exactly as valid as the idea of race itself.
Now, if we admit that “race” is just a dishonest label assigned to certain ethnic categories...
But even on that basis, 1/16 is not very meaningful.
> Now, if we admit that “race” is just a dishonest label assigned to certain ethnic categories...
...then we're looking at demographic groups, like the earlier comment asked about.
To you... Many people find it meaningful including American Indian tribes which require ancestry of that amount.
People begin inquisitiveness and empathy after realizing they are part of a uniquely North American diaspora. Its really not about being a poser or trying to get an obscure scholarship. The inquisitiveness leads to finding relatives and members of a tribe thought disbanded or eradicated, reconnecting by fractional blood can lead to being eligible for recognition, land and some degrees of sovereignty.
1. Ulster-Scots, i.e. the Scottish people who moved into northern part of Ireland (now all of Northern Ireland plus a couple of counties in Ireland)
2. Some Irish and some Scottish, i.e. they have ancestors from both places and want a word to describe this
3. Generally celtic, i.e. they know it's Ireland or Scotland or maybe both and want to cover their bases
Neither is particularly harmful, but I kind of wish some people understood that #1 is a distinct thing
(People in those parts of the country are disproportionately likely to be Scotch-Irish, and therefore to have an ancestor who named a child after William III).
if society ever gets this right about northern ireland it will be a good day for everyone :)
This is covered in significant detail in "Albion's Seed", among others.
My family has moved to a new country every hundred-ish years so it’s hard to pin down a specific race anyways.
In the 80s and early 90s the reservation was very poor on average (entire area is/was rural so it wasn't just on the res but it was significantly worse there). If you have ever watched the movie "Smoke signals" it has scenes shot which depict life on the local reservation (Coeur d'Alene tribe). Since the mid 90s or so things changed very rapidly for the tribe. The people are healthier, the infrastructure is better and the population seems to be growing and overall happier (again...observations).
What changed? Casinos.
Our local tribe went from being very poor with seemingly little voice in local politics to "very important" to the local community. They have not only improved their own lives but also invest heavily in improving the region and have a focus on things like the lake and natural preservation. Again...from my general observations...
It makes a certain intuitive sense; a lot of reservation land was, unfortunately, poor land in the middle of nowhere. Building a casino in the middle of nowhere won’t do you any good, so the tribes that profit are the ones with proximity to major population centers (see: Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun in CT; Winstar and Chocktaw in OK). It ends up coming down to luck and location more than anything else.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coeur_d%27Alene_people#Environ...
Cd'a, Spokane, Kalispel and Chewelah all opened tribal casinos and a few of them did fairly well.
As others have stated...proximity to a fairly large metropolitan area helps bring in traffic. Not to mention the area is on/near the junction of 2 major highways (I-90 and US95), airport, tourism...etc.
Fun fact, the poorest county's casino I mentioned in my other post is 20 miles off of I-90 as well. Interstates are funny like that.
I was told once it was the largest metropolitan area on I90 between Seattle and Minneapolis. There is a lot of nothing out there.
Of course, this may lead to targeted policies, just as insulin is applied to people with a diabetes diagnosis, and not to the general population.
But by constantly reminding people of their racial category, a feedback loop is created. The more are people defined by their race, the more important will they consider their racial category. They will also start viewing more interactions through the race angle, especially the negative ones. Not "the policeman was rude because he is an asshole", but "the policeman was rude because I am of a different race from him".
I cannot imagine a scenario where constant race consciousness leads to people being less concerned about anything that can be construed as racially charged.
Before positive changes can be made, people need to recognize that do-nothing mindset is very common. On this, two days after Martin Luther King Jr Day, it may be value for us all to reflect on his words on the difference between the peace of the absence of tension and the peace of the presence of justice.
The Democratic party has held the belief that demographics will keep them in power without having to actually address economic and legal inequalities, that is, without having to do anything at all.
But the middle and lower classes will never find solidarity amongst themselves so long as we are fixated on identity, and nothing will change (that's the point).
I already expounded way more than was worth the effort on here recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29981488
As someone on the boot-end of people who chant "no politics maaaaan, just vibin', peace and love with no ideology" to distract from the boot, I vehemently disagree.
It's not, inherently, though it can be used that way, which is the essence of bourgeois identity politics, which is a distinct subset of identity politics.
> The best improvements for everyone will come from policies which ignore identity and materially improve the lives of people.
Identity is often intimately tied to distinct material circumstances; policies that “ignore identity and materially improves the loves of people”, without exception, ignore the distinct material circumstances of identifiable groups of people while improving the material circumstances of other groups of people, and invariably do so in ways which favor the groups most privileged by visibility in the status quo.
> The Democratic party has held the belief that demographics will keep them in power without having to actually address economic and legal inequalities
That's very much not true of either of the major factions of the Democratic Party. The dominant neoliberal centrist faction actively doesn't want to deal with the economic inequalities more than is necessary to smooth out social disruptions interfering with corporate capitalist profit making (though it does want to deal with legal inequalities that impede efficient exploitation of human potential by capital), to the point of being willing to have the party lose power rather than doing more than is necessary to that end, whereas the progressive populist wing actively wants to deal with the problems.
And neither faction is so ignorant of the political realities of the US system to expect that the party is secure in it's (extremely narrow) federal legislative majority or control of the White House.
Not so fast. Au courant are stories around data disaggregation, highlighting that Asian Americans in NYC have the highest poverty rate (also noted is the way this runs counter to popular perceptions). But rather than splitting up the populace in increasingly finer-grained ways, why don't we just do something to address the poverty in our society?
To wit, yes we agree the DNC does want to do anything about poverty or economic inequalities in general. They are happy to stage photo ops while draped in kente cloth but they will never do anything to improve the material circumstances of the lower classes.
> The Democratic party has held the belief that demographics will keep them in power without having to actually address economic and legal inequalities
>> That's very much not true of either of the major factions of the Democratic Party.
You mean the neoliberal and conservative wings of the Democratic party? I assume "the squad" knows how to use political power as well as Manchin, but the fact that they don't indicates they, too, simply use identity as a means to the ends of the donor class.
Because the actual specific dynamics are different for different parts of society; when you try to address the problem without regard to those differences, which tend to be very closely tied to identity because they are one of the things that forges shared identities, you end up addressing the broad problem in the way which address the way that problem manifests in the most dominant group primarily.
> I assume "the squad" knows how to use political power as well as Manchin,
Better, probably.
> but the fact that they don't
Uh, they do.
What they don't do is have the position Manchin (or Sinema) does by virtue of the 50-50 balance in the Senate, and the reliable support of Republicans when they oppose the rest of the Democratic Party.
Every one of my very white looking kids has fielded questions about that dark hispanic guy hanging around, or knocking on the door to pick them up. They've also been privy to rascist discussion that they've later shared with me, since people don't see them as non-white.
Heck, I didn't see myself as non-white until I moved to a rural school in the early 90's.
For example those whose ancestors didn't partake in the Dawes Roles are generally excluded from tribal membership even if they are genetically similar; the reasoning being they haven't been present as citizens in generations.
And really, what should we care about most? A particular hue of skin, or our values, principles, traditions, and history?
That's always been a hard question to answer when there's an existing reality and history in which the "should" in your first sentence is replaced by "do". It's easy to say that it would be best to start doing the right thing today (or even yesterday); much harder to do that after centuries of doing the wrong thing.
Race is a social construct. The census strengthens that construct. OP’s argument is that race should be a weaker construct, which is a legitimate if debatable argument.
Therefore, something such as race, even if it is an arbitrary social construct used to divide based on nothing more than skin color, is important to measure against other factors such as income and address. It helps you decide when/where/what is being discriminatory.
Race should be a weaker social construct, yes. But living in Infinite Fun Space doesn't help anyone today in the real.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2015/06/12/us/washington-spokane-naacp-r...
Transgender people have only very recently been given the faintest legitimacy, and they naturally want to defend that against transracialists and otherkin and other movements that basically look like a parody of trans people. Even if their logic isn't fundamentally stronger than those other movements, transgender people have something that actually matters: a little bit of power.
Why should anyone sacrifice that to the altar of logic?
1: https://www.childwelfare.gov/topics/systemwide/diverse-popul... 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20121206131053/http://www.amnest... 3: https://web.archive.org/web/20050829051045/http://sacbee.com... 4: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/17/us/native-american-boardi... 5: https://www.wsj.com/articles/canadian-graves-of-indigenous-c... 6: https://www.voanews.com/a/usa_federal-judges-reconsider-indi...
I highly recommend Cecily Hilleary's relevant articles on VOA if you're unfamiliar of the grotesque and disturbing history of forced assimilation and cultural genocide through America's Indian Boarding schools. They are excellent primers on the topic, highlighting yet another example of the US's embarrassing treatment of America's indigenous population.
Examples of Cecily Hilleary's great investigative work on boarding schools and maltreatment of Native children:
- https://www.voanews.com/a/usa_oneida-nation-boarding-school-... - https://www.voanews.com/a/usa_native-americans-feds-own-amer... - https://www.voanews.com/a/indian-boarding-schools-outings-ap... - https://www.voanews.com/a/assessing-blame-for-deaths-of-indi... - https://www.voanews.com/a/scholars-work-to-untangle-the-comp...
Some recommended reading if you're interested in learning more about Indian boarding schools:
- https://www.amazon.com/Pipestone-Life-Indian-Boarding-School... - https://www.amazon.com/dp/0700629602/ref=wl_mb_wl_huc_mrai_2... - https://www.amazon.com/Middle-Five-Indian-Schoolboys-Omaha/d... - https://www.amazon.com/Stringing-Rosaries-Unforgivable-Conte... - https://www.amazon.com/Boarding-School-Blues-Educational-Exp... - https://www.amazon.com/They-Called-Me-Uncivilized-Everyday/d...
As white culture has become more and more generic due to mass media and little regional variation, many people are going to try to find something unique or “exotic” about themselves to make them stand out. It’s peacocking, both inwardly and outwardly focused. You see this especially strong in social and mating contexts (read: bars).
There’s a lot of problems with this, but primary is that it puts the Native American experience as one that exists only in the past. Not the reality of the lives lives by people belong to the various tribes and nations today.
That is not the reason some white people try very hard to find some non-white person in their family tree and are willing to go so far as to make one up if they can't find one. Some do it in an attempt to be able to claim to be 'not one of those white folks' when confronted with anti-white narratives. Others - Elisabeth Warren [1], Rachel Dolezal [2], Tracy Castro-Gill [3] and many, many more - do it to try to get a piece of the positive discrimination/positive action/affirmative action pie which is set aside for members of specific identity groups. Others do it to have a way out when confronted with the all too common claims of "white supremacy" or "white privilege" or similar racialised slurs.
That white people voluntarily take upon them claims of non-whiteness should give lie to claims of oppression of the minorities they claim to be part of unless all those who take up (often faked) minority identities happen to be masochists.
[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/opinion-elizabeth-warren-nati...
[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-44256760
[4] https://www.dailywire.com/news/meet-the-seattle-schools-woke...
It’s almost like people are judging everyone by the color of their skin instead of the content of their character.
Imo the main statistic, number of people, is the most accurate. All the rest are optional inputs and may not accurately reflect the true data due to the nature of collection.
This has occurred in reservations all through the US, along Northern and Southern borders, creating large areas of lawlessness, at horrific human cost. It's not anti-government types so much as Mexican cartels and their types.
If they talk to any outsiders, it can mean death and torture.
Tribal police are strong in some places, but they're laughably insufficient in most cases, and there's an intersection of tribal pride, corruption, distrust of feds, and being overwhelmed that have given cartels a large number of virtually untouchable strongholds.
There are places law enforcement cannot and will not go inside the borders of the US under the control of drug cartel strongmen. Human trafficking, murder, disappearances, drug trade, murder for hire, money laundering, and so on are being hidden under the veil of tribal sovereignty.
The number of girls and young women that go missing is an atrocity, but the ones that go unreported are worse. These people are owed more.
I'm not sure what the solution is that preserves native sovereignty and roots out the cartels, but the US is headed for a dramatic escalation of violence inside the borders. I am as against the war on drugs as anyone, and support blanket legalization as a necessary tool in neutering cartels and their influence. The trouble now is that cartels with militarized presence and sophisticated logistics will need US military intervention within our borders, and on tribal lands, and that's a politically untenable proposition.
So it festers. People disappear. Outsiders see a superficial veneer of anti-government sentiment but the problems are much deeper and more destructive for native cultures. The longer it goes on, the higher the eventual cost will be.
It's shocking that this isn't better known, but maybe Americans don't want introspection of truly scary things.
https://news.azpm.org/s/30767-drug-cartels-target-indian-cou...
https://tulsaworld.com/news/local/drug-cartels-targeting-ind...
https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/world/article2...
https://www.npr.org/2021/05/03/993059731/u-s-mexico-efforts-...
https://www.ktvq.com/news/local-news/crow-leaders-call-for-m...
https://apnews.com/article/missing-in-indian-country-north-a...
https://www.npr.org/2021/03/12/976053675/human-trafficking-c...
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/ahwatukee/2020/02...
https://www.courier-journal.com/in-depth/news/investigations...
I could literally go on for thousands of small town stories, or tens of thousands individual family stories about murder and trafficking. This is happening in reservations all over the US and along southern Canada. All of the lower 48, I'm not sure about Hawaii or Alaska.
Along the west coast, lots of illicit marijuana farming, and lots of truck stops and trafficking logistics and meth manufacture elsewhere.
I don't know why we haven't seen a journalistic investigation into the big picture. I've spoken to native friends who have family on reservations who see cartel members recruiting youth, meeting with elders, and crazy shootouts.
Doubling would have been happier.
The American military has its good points. Being more fair/less unfair about racial issues seems to be one of them.
My career-Army ex-husband once said to me "We are all part of the Green Race." In other words, we are blood brothers because of the uniform and because of civilians excluding active duty military families.
When I was a military spouse, the general unemployment rate was around 5 or 6 percent and the unemployment rate for military spouses was around 30 percent. I think this is in part because locals don't want to hire someone knowing they will likely move again in two or three years and in part because the military has good benefits, so it is still possible -- or was when I was a military spouse -- to support a family on one income, which seems to generally not be true for most Americans these days.
The military tends to have a somewhat high percentage of people of color generally. I honestly think it's in part because promotions are less racially biased than they seem to be in the civilian world.
Isn't this due to the U.S. Military being more attractive to poorer people, which are statistically more likely to be of color?
But the top brass is definitely not racial diverse. So its actually the other way around. More people of color serve because poorer people are more likely to serve, but even when people of color are over represented in the military they are still underrepresented in the leadership. Making the military even more biased than rest of society.
A drill sergeant yelling equally at everyone does not mean that the system is equal.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-08-01/why-the-a...
Native American fertility is actually below replacement (and lower than white, last I saw). But the definition of NA is more expansive, and the population can "expand" through outmarriage.
You see something very similar going on with the Reform Jewish population. Reform Jews have relatively few kids, but a very high intermarriage rate (about 80% of Reform Jews marry non-Jews!) so you see the Reform Jewish population increasing regardless.
Both the Amish and the Haredim reject a lot of modernity and are quite conservative as well look to keep traditional families and gender roles. Probably not a coincidence that there are the groups still seeing strong growth.
All of this leads to the old joke, "What do you call 64 Cheyenne in a room?" "One indian."
The linked article unfortunately bases its conclusions on "self-identification," which is problematic. When the federal government sent the tribes billions of dollars in COVID relief money, suddenly there were newly-minted, self-described "indians" crawling out of the woodwork trying to get a check.
Also realated, there's currently a bunch of people on a reservation outside of Seattle who are being kicked out of their homes because they're not tribal enough. The tribe changed its definition, and because these people are from a related tribe up in Canada, they no longer qualify.
/Friends with a lot of indians. Subscribe to two indian newspapers. And yes "Indian" is correct. It's only white people and city indians who embrace the term "Native American." Rez indians call themselves "indians." Proudly.
It’s like the term “Asian.” Few people identify as generic “Asian” and it would be incorrect to equate it with a nationality or specific culture. But it does work at a high level to address a group of people who have something in common on a political dimension.
I'm not. I'm reiterating what has been told to me by close to a dozen Navajo, Hopi, and Zuni indians.
Why would some random archaeologist decide for a large group of people what they should be called, when they call themselves something else?
I happen to have the January 6, 2020 edition of The Navajo Times on my desk. Just skimming the headlines (because I haven't read it yet), I see the following:
"Phoenix Indian Center," "Gallup Indian Medical Center," "Indian Health Service," "Santa Fe Indian."
The Four Corners region of the United States is called "Indian Country" by the indians who live there.
What give you the right to tell people what they can call themselves?
Part of this whole respecting preferences is that individual terms have to be treated separately. "Indian" is different than "American Indian" which is again different from "Indian country" or "Indian law". Someone may dislike some or most of these without necessarily disliking the others. The ones with specific technical meanings we're unfortunately stuck with in context.
Another popular example of this sort of issue is "Navajo" itself, as many would prefer to be called Diné or some derivative thereof.
He's also put out a number of tangentially related videos inspired by his research work on Indians:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABMV4wXx6Xo
Well....maybe. 2 years is a long gap, even for Grey. I would assume he had hoped to put out much more by now. That he didn't is probably a reflection not just to COVID productivity but also lost motivation.
I hope that's not the case, but who knows...
Always awkward after conquests.
That being said, some tribes use their enrollment offices as a power play on some members. I do wish the federal government would step in some way. Its a tricky subject.
Yes, what Native Americans could use is more federal meddling in their lands, tribes, and affairs... /s
You can't take the easy way out and ignore the problem because you are part of the problem.
1) I remember a band that I thought was called "Beads and Feathers" that had Native Americans and Indians.
I've gotten the sense from Brown Pundits that among themselves they refer to themselves as Desi. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desi )
First Nations is what they say on the CBC, but "Indian" hasn't been stamped out completely.
Well, the same is the case with Europeans, Asians, and so on, so?
We have smaller identities, and larger group identities, it's not belonging or being categorized in one precludes the smaller more unique identity...
Does "Inuit" have two meanings?
Part of it is the word Eskimo. Not popular and falling out of fashion, people look for a replacement, and grabbed what a large subgroup of the people called that calls itself. And thus mislabeling those that are not in that subgroup.
To stretch the analogy again, lets assume for some reason "North American" has become a word to avoid, so lets just call all North Americans what the people from the USA call themselves to be more considerate. And the Canadians aren't happy with that.
I'll admit "inuit" is pretty widely accepted nowadays, but it's not universally so. The relevant ANLC page gives a good summary of the situation: https://www.uaf.edu/anlc/resources/inuit_or_eskimo.php
I've heard plenty Indians call themselves Indian. Probably tied to locality
When my father was in school in Northern Ontario they were having students cross out "savages" in text books & write in "Indians". While I was growing up the term was moving to aboriginal
I was raised to believe that 'the pendulum' coming to rest, so to speak, is the good thing.
What difference do you see between my comment and yours?
They described a lessening of discrimination.
Those are very different things.
With that in mind it is not a huge leap of the imagination that, if given the option to, many people will self-id as Native American to gain a perceive edge in a society were diversity is increasingly valuable.
Source: am member of a federally recognized tribe that only requires one parent be a member for their children to be a member, much like US citizenship, so unless that changes my children for 100 generations will be 100% Native-American just as they will be 100% American