Title: Native American vs American Indian: Understanding the Difference
Headings: Should You Use Native American or American Indian? That Depends on Who You Ask
Should You Use Native American or American Indian? That Depends on Who You Ask
Want to know what someone prefers to be called? Ask them.
The preference between using Native American or American Indian is personal.
Some people would rather be identified by their clan.
The U.S. Census uses the term American Indian.
Avoid the term "Indian," if you are non-Indigenous.

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That specificity matters to some because it's a way of honoring the culture that pre-dated European colonizers' arrival. " Many Native Americans identify as our tribes in our own languages," Allie Young, citizen of the Navajo Nation and founder of nonprofit Protect the Sacred, tells OprahMag.com. " For example, I prefer Diné, which means "the People" in our language, over Navajo, which is a Spanish name given to us by those who colonized our communities." According to Young, there are movements within tribal communities across the U.S. to restore the original tribal names, and make them the norm. Some people would rather be identified by their clan. In addition to tribal affiliation, other things a Native person may consider part of their self-identification include sharing a regional language, or their descent from a specific clan within a larger tribe, which shares its own inherited culture. "The other way we identify ourselves as Diné people is by our clans and clanship system. We call this K'é, meaning family and kinship," Young says. " Every Diné person's first clan is their mother's clan, which is also their maternal grandmother's clan and so on, passed down matrilineally.