Has anybody stopped to look at where the word tribe originated from? Where Indigenous people classified into tribes before colonization? Same thing with the Americans debate, what was South American referred to before Europeans got here? As a word tribe can be completely innocuous or it could have negative connotations - yes context means everything. Maybe the solution should be to look at the negative connotation of the word and stop using it in that context instead of trying to stop the use of the word across all contexts. So in this case, if there is a negative association with the word tribe in the US then maybe we should stop using that word to describe Indigenous people in the US and they can decide how they want to be described? It seems that this problem and similar issues with words are a result of Europeans applying their own labels to other people, so maybe the solutions is let distinct peoples decide for themselves what their name is, similar to the suggestion Dave mention earlier - self affirmation.
July 28, 2020, 11:40 a.m. - Mark
Has anybody stopped to look at where the word tribe originated from? Where Indigenous people classified into tribes before colonization? Same thing with the Americans debate, what was South American referred to before Europeans got here? As a word tribe can be completely innocuous or it could have negative connotations - yes context means everything. Maybe the solution should be to look at the negative connotation of the word and stop using it in that context instead of trying to stop the use of the word across all contexts. So in this case, if there is a negative association with the word tribe in the US then maybe we should stop using that word to describe Indigenous people in the US and they can decide how they want to be described? It seems that this problem and similar issues with words are a result of Europeans applying their own labels to other people, so maybe the solutions is let distinct peoples decide for themselves what their name is, similar to the suggestion Dave mention earlier - self affirmation.