"Native Americans" in history

The meaning of the term "native American" has evolved greatly since the time of the European voyages of discovery in the 15th and 16th centuries.

A typical nineteenth century usage of the term "native" is well illustrated in the part of the frieze (1880s) in the US capitol dome which depicts Christopher Columbus's landing in 1492: Columbus himself is portrayed as looking up, perhaps to Hea-ven to acknowledge the divine guidance that led him to cross the Atlantic and set in motion the sequence of events that would culminate in the founding of the United States (and in the creation of the frieze that commemorates Columbus...). On the right side of the frieze, the people that lived in the Americas when Columbus arrived are typical representatives of what nineteenth century Euro-Americans thought "natives" ought to be like: they wear primitive clothing with little or no distinction between the sexes, and are clearly in admiration and awe at the sight of the "noble Europeans" that had come to "discover" them. Their gratitude at the Europeans' arrival is suggested by the way they kneel to present their children or their offerings of local products: naturally-growing fruits, that require no sophisticated agricultural techniques to produce. To a large extent, by the end of the nineteenth century, the natives that are portrayed in the frieze had become memories of the past: European and Euro-American ships, weapons, diseases and philosophy had come close to eradicating the people that Columbus mistakenly called "Indians".

The term "native American" was still very much in use, however, though the referent it designated had greatly changed. At the time of independence, the colonists, who had previously thought of themselves as Englishmen and women, began to refer to themselves as "Americans": the term was available, since Columbus's term had taken root, and the descendants of the people that met him, i.e., the first Americans, were almost universally referred to as "Indians". "American" came to designate the descendants of the Europeans who had created the colonial empire on the American continent, and often even more specifically, the descendants of the English colonists. (It should be noted that although the end of the importation of slaves in 1808 meant that the roots on the American continent of most African-Americans reach back further than those of most white Americans, it is unusual even today to refer to African-Americans as "natives" of the US [see some thoughts on slavery here]). By the last third of the nineteenth century, then, the expression "native American" referred to the descendants of what was coming to be called the "old immigration", from the British Isles, Germany and Scandinavia.

By the middle of the century, the idea of "native Americans" had given rise to "nativism", i.e., xenophobic racism, an evil which has surfaced recurrently and in various forms in US history and has sometimes influenced US immigration policy and attitudes. A number of political parties advocating limitations on immigration by people who do not share the same ancestry, language, religion, or other characteristics as the members of the party can be classed as nativist.

The term "native American" continued to a large extent to refer to the descendants of the old immigration until the last decades of the twentieth century, despite occasional efforts by major political figures to point out the contradictions inherent in the usage (one thinks of the outrage that Franklin D. Roosevelt provoked when he began a speech to the Daughters of the American Revolution, a politically very conservative social club, by addressing his audience as "My fellow immigrants".) However, in the wake of the increased awareness of the roles played by diverse population groups in the history of the US that grew out of the political and intellectual ferment of the 1960s, the expression has come in the last twenty or thirty years to be used almost exclusively to designate the descendants not of Europeans, but of the people that had already lived on the American continent for several thousand years when Columbus arrived. Today, indeed, a "native American" is what Columbus called an "Indian".