I'm going to anger some people but here I go anyway. I don't like being called indigenous just call me native american.

I respect how you feel personally about the term, and I can understand why; but unfortunately it is such objections that are warping the language and making it very hard to avoid upsetting anyone.

[i]Every[/i] continent, barring Antarctica, has indigenous, native and possibly, aboriginal, populations.

There is nothing wrong with these words: they merely link people to place.

- [i]Native [/i]merely says where you were born (same root as natal and nativity).

- [i]Indigenous[/i] populations are those native as a whole to the place in question; and the word is used in biology generally as well as to human societies.

- [i]Aboriginal[/i] populations are from the first humans in their lands.

The difficulties and bad associations arise when some start giving these words artificial meanings and associations that ignore their etymologies. Worse still. when they use the words in wilfully unpleasant ways.


Use me as an example, and I admit I am of, and still live in, one the Western European nations that colonised the Americas and other lands, and treated the original residents appallingly :

I am [i]native[/i] to my country although my far-back ancestors might not be [i]indigenous[/i] to it, though it is impossible to trace lineage that far back in a country to which it would be impossible meaningfully to ascribe any [i]aboriginal [/i]population anyway.

It would not be possible, because over some thousands of years but still well after our species' diaspora from its African roots, we "Old World" countries' natives became an amalgam of any indigenous peoples aboriginal to each and to many other lands, anyway! Some by migration and diffusion, some by conquest; but still too mixed-up for aboriginality at less than continental scale - and that was happening even before there were things called "countries".