Tag books with "American Indian" or "Native American"?

I have a lot of books tagged "American Indian." I prefer the term to "Native American" for a few reasons. But the consensus on LT is definitely for "Native American."

I suppose one option is to double-tag everything. (I have one book tagged both "American Indian" and "First Nations," per the Canadian practice.)

Another is to replace the "American Indian" tag with "Native American."

So what do YOU do?

I have never seen a problem with the term "Indians"*. I have never heard of any sensitivity about calling the Caribbean islands the West Indes nor the cricket side they produce being known as the "West Indians" - all from a 15th C. ignorance of the Pacific Ocean by colonial powers but hardly an offensive term per se. Said colonial powers did give the indigenous people a hard time (I always think of Randy Newman's song, The Great Nations of Europe) but all this "First Nation" stuff seems like tokenism. I do know that if I were a Comanche or an Apache I would be pretty proud of my ancestors

*But then I'm old and was raised on John Ford, Hopalong Cassidy and the Lone Ranger and even the N-word might have slipped, unguarded, from my lips on occasion.

Vine Deloria just said Indian. He said we were all born here so we were all native Americans.

Seems regional, too, potentially. While I was growing up in the southwest, the people I knew (predominantly Dine and Hopi) preferred Native American. Midwestern writers like the aforementioned Deloria and the Treuer brothers use Indian and American Indian regularly if not interchangeably among the latter two.

>2 abbottthomas:

True, there's nothing inherently offensive about "Indian." There's just ambiguity about which Indians are meant, the ones from west of the Atlantic or north of the Indian Ocean.

>3 TLCrawford:

Deloria may have known this, but the earliest usage of "Native American" is as a term for native-born white American citizens, as opposed to immigrants.

The "Know-Nothings" favored the term in the 1840s. Hoping that Donald Trump doesn't find out. but The Donald has never been known as a reader of history.

#6 Right, they were called "nativists". I knew that but I failed to put 2 and 2 together.

A Canadian practice, more often now, especially with a broadening understanding of reconciliation, is using the term First Nations, which recognizes their diversity rather than an imposed Eurocentric homogeneity. Authors of First Nations origin often identify with their nation (eg. Dene, Cree, Metis, Inuk (Inuit), Mi'kmaq).

Reconciliation is meant in both a broad sense, and in a specific sense related to the Calls to Action as recommended and reported by Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (http://nctr.ca/reports2.php)