Is the term “Indian” Offensive? The Joy of Ethnonyms – FCPP

May 14, 2024

I would like to apologize to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for referring to its members as “colored people”. – Steve Martin, Pure Drivel, 1999

A man did a bad thing the other day. He called some people “Indians”. Upon learning of this, the editorial board of a local newspaper clutched its pearls and fell into a profound swoon. After being revived, they staggered to their desks and fired off an opinion piece denouncing the fellow and calling for him to be punished. Though this rogue (himself of Cree and Anishinabe descent) had already been castigated by the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs and his fellow trustees on the Mountain View School Board in Dauphin, Manitoba, and though an NDP cabinet minister had called for a governance review, the hyperventilating editorialists called for “serious consequences”.

The term “Indian”, said the journalists, was “hurtful” and “racist”. But was it? Outdated, perhaps, the result of a silly 430-year-old misapprehension – the fruit of Christopher Columbus’s mistaken belief that he had reached Asia by sailing westward in 1492 – but no sillier than calling white people Caucasians as if they had all emerged from the lands between the Black and Caspian Seas.