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Comment by mothballed | Hacker News Reader

If the Indians would have gone the King route alone rather than being on reservations they'd have been annihilated and you wouldn't even have been born. The token offering of the reservation was what they got in exchange for not fighting a losing battle to the last man, but the exchange wouldn't have happened had that not been on the table.

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The poster you're responding to might be from the Indian subcontinent and not Native/Indigenous American.

In US Native/Indigenous usually call themselves either by their tribe or "Indian." White people are the ones that generally use native/indigenous more even though natives call themselves Indian more.

Since the context was US civil rights you can see how I came to the conclusion, since it didn't make any sense someone could simply declare their heritage is from an extra-continental nationality and thus I was wrong.

In any case in the context of US civil rights, the Indians (native) are a far more reasonable conclusion than Indian (Asian) so at best it is a shared failure of communication.

> In any case in the context of US civil rights, the Indians (native) are a far more reasonable conclusion than Indian (Asian)

Why? There's a very direct link between India and the US civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1959_visit_by_Martin_Luther_Ki...

I understand your confusion and I didn't downvote you. But the answer to "Which Indian?" is at the very least a coin flip in this context.

I think the ”Indian” there referred to India the country and Gandhi’s nonviolent protest as background

Excellent point. Though I find it distasteful when someone uses an ambiguous word counting on you to be able to figure it out from context, then "ha ha you are wrong" downvotes follow when I make a good faith effort to respond to it. It's certainly a weaponization of the word if it is implied the counterparty is naïve when they guessed the wrong one.

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