I try to look at as many blogs as I can, particularly the ones to which I have links, and especially ones that have links to me. I was checking out Evil of Indifference today, and they posted an interesting piece from Market Ticker. It’s a great blog for those of you who like no-nonsense news stories. Check it out http://evilofindifference.wordpress.com/
Anyway, I agreed with most of the things in the story, except for one thing I strongly disagreed with. So much so, I felt I had comment. After writing my comment, I thought to myself, “Hey, that’s pretty good! So good, in fact, I think I going to have to write a post on it.” If you want to read the story here it is. http://evilofindifference.wordpress.com/2013/06/18/amnesty-will-destroy-america/
Here’s the part I disagreed with, and I heard so many things like it over the years that I feel I must tell everyone how I feel.
America is a nation of immigrants. I’m the offspring of immigrants and odds are you are too. Unless you’re 100% native American, you are a son or daughter of immigrants, directly or a few generations removed. Even if you can trace your heritage to the original colonists, you are the product of immigration.
First of all, I’m a Native American, most of the people I know are Native Americans, and most of you reading this are Native Americans. In order to be a Native American, all that is required of one is that he or she is born in America. Just like someone born in Wisconsin, is a native Wisconsinite, and someone born in England is a native Englishman.
Second, I believe the people to whom which the author was referring are correctly called INDIANS, since that’s what we have been calling them for centuries. I hate it when we feel that we must start changing the words we use to identify groups of people or things, especially when the new word(s) used already have another meaning that makes more sense. Native has always meant “born here” and American has always meant citizen of the United States. Therefore the primary definition of Native American can only mean citizen of the United States that was born in the United States.
Third, the INDIANS are the descendents of immigrants every bit as much as Americans of European ancestry. It is a widely accepted theory that human life originated in Africa and the ancestors of the INDIANS crossed a land bridge that once existed across the Bering Strait. There is no statute of limitations that I have ever heard of that deals with being the product of immigrants, so as far as that is concerned American citizens are on equal ground with the INDIANS.
If anything anyone who sees themselves as an American first has more of a claim to this land than anyone who first considers themselves an INDIAN simply because we (and by that I mean the ancestors of us Native Americans) overpowered the INDIANS. Since the dawn of man, this is the system that has been used to determine who has the rights to any land. If you disagree with that, you’d better get busy trying to overturn the outcome of most of history’s wars. Good luck with that.
One last thing, it is certain that all of the INDIAN tribes that were here at the time of the arrival of the first Europeans, certainly overpowered some other tribe in order to obtain the land that they controlled, so INDIANS are not on any higher moral ground than the rest of us Native Americans.
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