LogFAQs > #964429462

Racists do it because they know it gets a rise out of people that don't like racism. It's that simple, you don't need to dig for any sort of deeper motivation.

Regular people do it because change is hard and pushbacks against indigenous racism are relatively recent (see, Canada's last residential school only closing in 1996), such that the terminology has evolved quite rapidly. The "proper" term has switched between "Native American," "aboriginal," "indigenous," and "First Nations" pretty quickly, such that even those that do care about being respectful have a hard time keeping straight what the best term is.

That's compounded by a great many native people not actually caring and often still using the term "Indian" themselves because they're generally dealing with more important problems than white people being embarrassed that some dude a few hundred years ago made a mistake about where he was. If anything, using blanket terms at all is more of an issue than which specific blanket term you use. If you actually want to be respectful, reference the nations' actual names whenever possible.

The_tall_midget posted...

I'd say it's simply laziness since saying "Indian" is just faster than saying "native American".

"Native" is faster than "Indian," and generally works roughly as well in everyday contexts. "First Nations" is technically the same number of syllables, but it's got a bunch of complex consonant sounds that slows it down quite a bit.