Guns, empires and Indians: Imperial politics triggered an indigenous arms race | Hacker News Reader

Guns, empires and Indians: Imperial politics triggered an indigenous arms race

aeon.co

24 pointsbenbreen4 comments

>...gave European colonists significant military advantages over Native American people wielding bows and arrows, clubs, hatchets and spears. The attractiveness of such goods also meant that Indians desired trade with Europeans, despite the danger the newcomers represented.

Every time they use "Indians" after this I have to assume they mean Native Americans, though no where is that indicated or made understandable.

Is there any expectation that at some point in the future we will never again refer to the original habitants of North America as "Indians"? Everyone understands the term "American Indian" to mean indigenous person, but using just "Indian" and expecting people to know by context that you mean literally not an Indian person doesn't seem like a future facing literary move.

As the article talks about Mohawks, Iroquois, Cherokee etc and European colonies at "the East Coast of North America" the meaning is quite clear.

But not from the title - I assumed it was talking about India, not North America.

Probably not because most writers aren't concerned with articles from an out-of-country point of view and since quite a few local reservation high school teams are named "Indians" which indicates a local acceptance. "American Indian" is pretty well the accepted form of address for a lot of tribes but people do get tired of the added word. "Native American" is used quite a bit and the Canadians went with "1st Nation"[1], but plain "Indian" is ingrained. Amazingly, I haven't run into anyone who calls themselves "indigenous people".

1) although their picking of the word "reserve" instead of "reservation" almost got me into a brawl in 87. "What reserve did you come from?" was probably a friendly question, but we were young and my friend took it really, really wrong.

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