I live in a town which has the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture, the Museum of the American Indian, and an annual Indian Market, and I’ve never heard a single complaint about it.
In my experience, using an actual tribe or nation is preferred: if nothing else it’s more accurate to say that someone is Zuni or Navajo or whatnot, but when that’s not practical, Indian seems to be fine.
Meh, I don’t care how the Cherokee decide their tribal members. But I have heard members of other tribes making snide comments.
The Hamster King, yup - for some tribes, all descendants of the original enrollees are considered members. The flip side of that is that it can be very difficult to impossible to join if your ancestors declined to be listed on the rolls, even if you have incontrovertible documentation.
elfkin477, by some folks’ reckoning, you are! 
As the sole red-haired, green-eyed, pasty-white child in a dark-tanned, brown-haired family, I was often suspected of being (a) adopted, (b) a neighbor/friend of the family, or (c) the product of cuckoldry. But you and I could be sibs! 
With something like 70-odd tribes in the state, not to mention all the multi-tribal families, people here usually just use ‘Indian’. Someone I actually know, I’ll probably know their tribe, but the other umpteen I deal with a day, not so much.
I work in a town that calls itself “The Indian Capital of the Nation”. It maintains an Indian Museum and an Indian Hall of Fame. Half of the residents are Indians. I never hear them use “Native American”. They even use Indian as an insult as in “On Indian time” to denote someone that is always late.
Russell Means, 1980 speech in the Black Hills
I refuse to use this, honestly. “From India” works just as well. Dots and feathers are both correct and incorrect characterizations of both cultures I feel. Either way, much too simplistic.
I am not offended by the usage, btw. 
Just don’t use it myself.
One more thing I would like to add - I’d certainly like it if more NA were to use their tribe names. Give me a chance to learn more!
Don’t even, yo. My friend has the same complexion, but brown hair and freckles and identifies strongly with her Irish ancestry.
But damn, when she could prove she had Native ancestry (some great-grandmother or something) she was all over that because then she gets a crapload of funding from the government for school. Whitiest white girl ever, but I can’t blame her, really. If I could get my degree mostly paid for I’d do it too.
My wife also used to spend some time on Capitol Hill helping to hit up Congresscritters for scholarship funding for American Indians. My impression is that other tribes eye-roll at the 1/16th-bloodline Cherokee thing because of (A) a notion of tribal “purity” but also (B) because the large size of the Cherokee “tribe” soaks a disproportionate amount of government funding/scholarships/grants from tribes with stricter requirements.
I’ve known a fair number of Native people. My wife once spent a couple of years working at a reservation school, I had a roomate for a year who was half Sioux and I’ve just randomly met a great number of others throughout the years. North Dakota has a pretty large Native population.
I believe every Indian I ever met said “Indian.” I don’t remember any of them ever objecting to it. I think that “American Indian” works pretty well to avoid the confusion with Asian Indians (if you don’t know the tribe), and the only people I’ve ever encountered who thought that term was offensive were white people who’d never met any American Indians.
White people are the only people I’ve ever seen get offended by the word “black” as well.
$5 says your girlfriend is white and was taught to say Native American by other white people. Anybody I’ve ever heard insist on “Native American” is white; anybody I’ve known who’s actually feather-versus-dot prefers, if you need a generic catch-all term, (American) Indian.
A) This is funny!
B) My husband is a card carrying member of the Mohawk nation. His favorite kind of food to cook? …from-India-Indian
C)I suppose it demonstrates how completely we can contextualize a word that this never even struck me before.
For the record, he and his family almost always use “Indian” and are not offended by it.
and thank you for the “Generokee” ad redtail. Can’t wait to play it for him!
So what’s the current thinking on “Injun”?
I guess we’d have to find some redskins and ask them.
I don’t follow baseball.
FWIW, I will mention that there is a cable channel up here in the frozen north whose official name is APTV, Aboriginal People’s TV. In the Olympics, I watched some curling on it and I saw a game broadcast in English, one in French, and one in Cree (I think) on this station. I think they use some other Indian (or aboriginal) languages as well, but not Inuktituk.
This made me chortle.
That is all.
This may be true. I spent a good deal of time on one of the country’s larger reservations, west of the Mississippi (although I am not of Indian descent myself), and I never heard anyone there refer to him or herself as anything other than “Indian” (although sometimes more specific tribe names were used).
I haven’t had enough encounters with Indians or Native Americans east of the Mississipi to know what they call themselves.
Wisconsin is east of the Mississippi, and AFAIK (American) Indian is preferred here.
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