• Potatar@lemmy.world
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    11 hours ago

    What if we called the original people Americans, and the newcomers immigrant Americans?

    Clarity: Native American -> American

    American -> Immigrant American

    • SparrowRanjitScaur@lemmy.world
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      3 hours ago

      And due to the transitive property of humans, if we follow this through to its logical conclusion then native Americans are immigrant Americans too

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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        2 hours ago

        Which is why “indigenous” is the best word in my opinion. Not just for the indigenous Americans, but for indigenous people the world over. It’s generally understood to mean “pre-colonial.”

        Edit: The only exception I can think of is that the Vikings settled Greenland before the Thule (who became the Greenland Inuit), but Danes are not considered indigenous and Inuit are. Maybe because the Vikings that settled there all left or died out and also maybe because the Vikings and the Thule settled different parts of Greenland and had very little contact with each other even when they could clearly see each other across a fjord. The very Christian Vikings of that era were probably quite reluctant to interact with people they saw as heathens.

      • Potatar@lemmy.world
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        10 hours ago

        Not really. Those are human made concepts, so you must start from the inception of the concept of immigration. Good luck finding the exact date, since it predates written language :/

        • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world
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          9 hours ago

          Well since dates are human concepts as well we can just state it is immigration date 00/00/0000. Are the months or days first? That’s up to you, haha. You make a good point, but you understand what I mean. If we consider immigration only being the integration into another state permanently then we would have to say we had mostly open immigration into the U.S. until the later parts of the 1800s. The first 99 years there were no real immigration laws here. (So roughly 40% of our history had no immigration restrictions for the most part)