Talk:Native Americans in the United States

Hostile Native Americans

Some Native American tribes killed American settlers and trappers. The Umpqua, Modoc, and Comanche. Should a violence segment be in this article or how violence was an acceptable practice with some Native American tribes, just as violence was acceptable to some white Americans? Was violence a right of passage for some tribes?

Intergroup violence is a human universal, i.e. all people do it. There's no need to make a particular story out of it in this article. The article should not give the impression that violence was a one-sided affair, with only white people attacking Indians, not vice versa; or that Indians only fought back in cases of obvious self-defense. On the other hand, it should not create a false equivalence by ignoring the fact that on average Indians tended to get the worst of the violence and it had a much more destructive effect on their societies.—Greg Pandatshang (talk) 19:03, 20 November 2010 (UTC)

Panderica

Early Americans and Indians followed a community called as panderica, its mixture of both Indian and American culture.they worship both Jesus and Siva. — Preceding unsigned comment added by WilliamRedBull (talk • contribs) 11:03, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

American Indian map

Is there a map of American Indians showing tribal dispersal in the United States region? If so it should be put in the article. Cmguy777 (talk) 02:48, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

1924

The 1924 law is said to have been fully implemented in 1948. I want more detail. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.97.194.200 (talk) 16:49, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 gives details of the wait till 1948. Both dates, 1924 and 1948, are just after a World War. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.97.194.200 (talk) 12:00, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

George Washington

'George Washington advocated the advancement of Native American society and he "harbored some measure of goodwill towards the Indians.'

This seems a bit of a simplistic and misleading caption, considering he ordered his men to destroy native settlements, murder entire villages, and became known among native Americans as 'town destroyer'. I'm not experienced enough with wikipedia to be comfortable making changes on what will probably be a controversial topic, but I just thought I'd flag it up 92.28.39.160 (talk) 15:36, 4 January 2011 (UTC)

Time period (20th c.) when this (clumsy) term was coined

I "stole" it from the Native American name controversy article: it was in the 1960s and 1970s. I'd appreciate if anyone with editing rights could put this into the article in the Common Usage section. I currently can't due to the protection. Thank you. -andy 77.190.60.3 (talk) 06:10, 8 January 2011 (UTC)

Iroquois Paragraph in Pre-Columbian needs work

The paragraph about the Iroquois at the end of the pre-columbian section needs work. It seems inconsistent, out of place, and needs writing help. First, the previous paragraphs in the section provide an overview of each group that included a geographic area and timeline. The Iroquois section does not. Second, according to the Iroquois article, it is not pre-Columbian. Finally, the comment by the Temple professor comes out of nowhere and has nothing to do with this article. It is an interesting comment, just misplaced and without transition. --EricE (talk) 02:07, 23 January 2011 (UTC)

WP:NOTESSAY

Wow. Where to start...

This entire article is written like an essay, in contravention of standard Wikipedia practices. While it may be nice to add sugar like "Many Native Americans and advocates of Native American rights point out" or "They were often disappointed", this is not the way to go. In times past, people would look something up in a book, likely an opinion pace of some random author, and put it in an essay like it was fact, often translating it into their own words. This is a time of Google Books people, and this type of editing will just not fly; I demand every bit of information in this article be thoroughly and verifiable sourced. This means page numbers people. Please see other articles for inspiration. The organization is usually extremely dry, with short concise headings, as encyclopedias usually are. Contrast this with the writing style of an essay: "Transmuted Native America" is a good example. Transmuted is an opinion or an interpretation or something else, but is arguably not a fact. This would be like calling someone fat; the correct method of ascribing this feature in an encyclopedia would not be to say "is fat", but that "so and so said" or "according to <such and such, such as the BMI>, ... is overweight/fat". This may even be common agreement among the experts in the field, but even so keep it out of the title, and cite sources which mentioned transmuted or similar terminology or concepts.

Each such issue may be insignificant, but taken together make an article that reads like an essay, with facts that are difficult to tell from analysis/OR and are extremely difficult to verify. For added measure, I will be going through many of these sentences and checking them against citations, but before that I will be reorganizing. (Bold, I know...) Note that when reorganizing, material may get duplicated but not removed, I'll leave that for fact checking and the like. It may result in sections that is full of material that plainly had little to do with the subject at hand, so these will need to get merged in somewhere, re-written, or removed later.

For example, the article currently has history mixed in with almost every part of the article. The historical events should be mentioned in the history section first, where they are completely/significantly explained, and other sections should build upon that. For instance, the bit about the "Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act" of 1975 way down towards the bottom should be introduced in history, and should be expanded on in other sections as it applies. The significance and context of this act may be interpreted in as many ways as their are authors; it may be in the context "policy changes", or it may be in the context of continued oppression. Mention who or what states these contexts, and leave it for the reader to decide. I disagree that it marked the "culmination of 15 years of policy changes", this is an example of an opinion or original research. There are so many examples of this I will not be changing them until the organization is reasonable.

For good measure, I will be adding most if not all historical material into the history section, which will likely grow considerably and need changes to the current organization, although the current organization seems good as of now. As such it will likely deserve its own article. Int21h (talk) 20:46, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

You are proposing a monumental task. This has long been needed. I will help were i can. Good luck old timer :-)' and thanks for letting us know your going to be doing some major changes. Moxy (talk) 21:09, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

Great Britain

After the colonies revolted against Great Britain and established the United States of America

Note: you can't revolt against an island. Great Britain is an island not a country. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.5.30.93 (talk) 18:00, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

Inaccurate wiki article: UND Fighting Sioux mascot NOT retired and won't be

NOTE: North Dakota has NOT in fact retired their mascot based on a Native American head. Last week the ND legislature passed a law requiring the continued use of the Fighting Sioux logo.

Thus, this wikipedia article is inaccurate, as it indicates that the University of North Dakota has in fact retired the logo/nickname, when they actually have not, and now are legally disallowed from doing so.

The wiki page should remove UND Fighting Sioux as an example of a university that has changed their mascot. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 199.133.190.55 (talk) 17:15, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

 Done per reliable media citations ([1], [2]) that support your assertion.--JayJasper (talk) 20:38, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

Split

This article is incredibly long at about 16,000 words. Perhaps the 6,000-word history section should be split into a history of Native Americans in the United States in summary style? —Mrwojo (talk) 20:00, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

I think there's a natural split in this article between: a) history of the indigenous peoples; and b) current situation of the indigenous peoples, or possibly a three-way split: a) history prior to contact with the settlers; b) history of the interaction with the settler society; and c) current situation. So, I would support breaking out the history section and generally refactoring the article on the basis of a historical/contemporary split.

I've been a bit surprised to notice how not interested I seem to be in reading articles like this one, given that I think I'm generally quite interested in the subject. I think it comes down to something related to the question of what this article is really about. In what sense is American Indians in the United States a discrete topic? Indigenous people living here before 1776 certainly didn't know they were in the United States (and for people in, say, the Pacific northwest, they didn't become in the United States until much later). And yet, their history certainly didn't begin at that time. I should really say histories because we are hard-pressed to say very much about their histories and cultures that was universal or anything close to universal. There may be some commonalities, among them a common physical type, but they are not so easy to find — if you take a look at wals.info, there are a battery of linguistic typological traits that are much more common in North America or the Americas generally than in the rest of the world. Even then, I'm not sure they belong in this article because there's no reason to think they begin at or near the Rio Grande and end at or near the 48th parallel.

So, it seems unavoidable that this article is going to be primarily about the history of interaction between Indians and American state/society and about contemporary Indian issues in the U.S., because there is nothing else that makes the American Indians of the U.S. of the U.S.—Greg Pandatshang (talk) 22:26, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

Support It's certainly far too long, per WP:SIZERULE. --Trevj (talk) 12:21, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

Broken formatting

The table (at least I think that's what it is) at the beginning of the article is quite obviously broken. I'd fix it myself, but I don't have the know-how to do so. Someone really needs to fix this. ☠ QuackOfaThousandSuns (Talk) ☠ 23:20, 23 May 2011 (UTC)