- arent native americans the only real american?
- isnt everyone else just an immigrant?
- isnt everyone else just an immigrant?
I'm a Bangladeshi immigrant married to an Anglo-American. Almost everything about America reflects her culture, not mine. At home, we speak the language her ancestors spoke, not mine. We're both lawyers. We deal with concepts her ancestors developed over the past 800 years, not mine. Our kids grow up learning things like individualism, which is a concept her ancestors developed, not mine. She's descended from settlers, whereas I'm an immigrant. It's like the Last Samurai, where Tom Cruise's character settles down with the Japanese woman. He's an immigrant, but she's not an immigrant--even though technically Yamato people came to Japan from the Korean peninsula: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yayoi_people.
In fact it's even starker because the United States borrows almost nothing from the Indian nations that existed on the land before it, while the Jomon people had a much larger influence on present-day Japan.
Given the amount of these foodstuffs that are produced today, Native Americans are probably more important to modern US culture than most European immigrant nations.
Mexican culture is more visibly influenced by its native ancestors, so via Mexicans and “Hispanics” the US also has a strong connection.
Law is a domain that has very few native-inspired aspects, probably because it traces its roots to England and the old Saxon and French traditions, but your domain is a bit special there.
One might argue that the legal system, as it was brought by the conquerors, naturally has little representation of the conquered.
Afaik anthropology as a field tends to differ: Food is a strong marker of cultural adhesion and identity. Jewish, Muslim and Brahmin food traditions may serve as an example here.
Though this is beside the point. I wanted to point out strong Native American contributions to what one would consider the modern US American identity.
The point is that most of culture lies beneath the surface and food is a very superficial indicator of it. Eating corn doesn’t mean you share anything really meaningful with Native Americans. My wife grew up eating Japanese food because her dad is a Japanophile. But she’s not meaningfully culturally Japanese in any way.
You have almost all of that e.g. in Europe and nobody associates it with native Americans.