Paul Nachman #fundie webcache.googleusercontent.com

Fidel Rivera [ Email him] 20th-generation New Mexican and author of tonight’s VDARE.com letter, angrily wrote:

You still have to pay for what you did to the Indians, THE REAL AMERICANS!

Mr. Rivera’s “real Americans” claim is a variation on the familiar trope that American Indians were “the first Americans.”

But they really weren’t, since what people almost always mean when they say “America” is the European-seeded polity known as “the United States.” Indeed, typing “America” into Wikipedia’s search box yields (without “disambiguation”) their entry for “United States,” and that article’s section on etymology concludes with this:

“American” rarely refers to subjects not connected with the United States."

So this place wasn’t really America until the whites came and developed it, a point that’s reinforced by a brief passage in Richard Bernstein’s terrific 1994 book Dictatorship of Virtue: How the Battle over Multiculturalism Is Reshaping Our Schools, Our Country, and Our Lives

(To forestall reflexive caterwauling about the nasty-nativist Bernstein’s violent hate speech [i.e. the three paragraphs just above], I should point out that the now-retired journalist was in his second decade at The New York Times when he authored Dictatorship, that he has a Harvard master’s degree in History and East Asian Languages, and that his wife is a noted Chinese classical dancer.)

So if the tribes inhabiting (before European settlement) what became the United States shouldn’t be called “the first Americans” or “the real Americans,” what should we call them? I propose “Turtle Islanders.”

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Confused?

So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!

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