Set Your Intention Every Week With Oprah!īelow, a high-level look at a complicated topic: The terms American Indian vs Native American vs Indigenous. Similarly, every person of Native American descent is shaped by that history in addition to their personal experiences regionally, whether or not they live on a reservation or identify as a citizen of a particular tribe.
Each Indian Nation's culture is uniquely shaped by its history, original languages, beliefs, and its members' past and current relationship to land they once held-or, in some cases, still hold-claim to.
was founded by European immigrants, Christopher Columbus the most famous among them, the current Nation members' ancestors inhabited what we now call North America. And, as is the case with the Hispanic vs Latino terminology debate (which comes with its own complex socio-geographic history), deferring to how people choose to define themselves is always best.įor thousands of years before the U.S. That said, there are terms that should definitely be avoided. Given the mammoth cultural diversity across that population, there's no single answer to questions like "what do Native Americans call themselves?" or "Is American Indian preferred?" Per Census data released in 2021, the number of people who self-identified as solely "Native American and Alaska Native" in 2020 was 3.7 million in combination with one or more races, that number jumps to 9.7 million. According to the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), “there are 574 federally recognized Indian Nations (variously called tribes, nations, bands, pueblos, communities and native villages) in the United States,” in addition to hundreds of sovereign tribal Nations.