By Brittany Luby, Kathryn Labelle, and Alison Norman
Editors note: This is the first in a two part series on the politics and practice of naming Indigenous peoples.
Over the years, Canadians have attempted to find a better word for “Indian.” We’ve experimented with “Native American.” We settled with “Aboriginal.” And now we’re flirting with “Indigenous.” Will we find a match?
Imagine each word with its own online dating profile. Indian’s profile might read “historically inaccurate, but legal.” Indigenous might write “trying to change the world one word at a time.”
Colonialism has created a need for a group term for North Americans – a word that means “the people who occupied this continent before European displacement,” a word that means “the people who violently resist, adapt, and continue to survive under colonial regimes in North America. And yet, regular changes to Canadian lexicon suggest that there is an underlying problem – a problem that a new combination of vowels and consonants cannot fix. For generations, Canadian scholars have been seeking a politically-correct label, a sensitive label, for a people who exist in the colonial imagination.[1] Continue reading