Emmi Ranta

Stefan Cornelius

@sadleopard838883 · Jan 12, 2026 7:19 am

CMV: People should stop using the argument that Native Americans should be referred to as members of their tribe instead

A lot of the time, when the argument comes up over what to call people who are descendants of the people who lived in the Americas (and generally who were in the US) before Columbus arrived (I will be referring to these people as Native Americans for simplicity), some people will say that those people should be and prefer to be referred to as members of their tribe. You shouldn't call them Native Americans, or Indigenous Americans, or anything else; you should call them the Navajo people or the Choctaw people.
But I feel this argument is senseless. Native Americans are each part of their own tribal nation, yes. But that doesn't mean using a word to collectively refer to them isn't useful, and that's why people are asking/debating over a term in the first place. Even if a term that fit that criteria would be referring to a highly diverse group of people, we already have and use terms like that for other groups of people. For example, people often use the words "European" and "Asian", even though, like "Native American" and other terms for those people, those words refer to people from many different nations and many different cultures, religions, languages, and ethnicities. Having a