How White Culture has Hijacked the American Indian Way of Life

If you aren't part of the solution, you're part of the problem. Maybe you were ignorant to certain facts before, which made lies easier to accept. You can't claim ignorance anymore, because I'm about to shed a little light on our current standards of "truth." I hope you can come away from this looking at "facts" with a more critical eye and throw your potentially gullible side out the window.

In our society, there is a large portion of us who admire Native American culture. Many of us, particularly Southerners, claim to have Native American ancestry in our family trees. If this is the case, at what point did we stop listening to and learning from actual Native American tradition and begin to believe anything that was placed before our eyes by popular white society? One major sign of this type of blind-grabbing towards something exotic to call our own is on bookshelves in every major bookstore in our nation, and accessible in vast numbers over the internet on major Web sites. I am referring to our culture of baby naming.

But what exactly is the wrong being committed? To be plain, baby name books and websites lie. Yes, that's right, I said it! It's not always intentional, but your favorite, most beloved books you've trusted from a reliable store... that website with millions of visitors that seems to have the highest amount of names and data you've ever seen... lies. And, it's all apparent once you've done a little bit of investigation deeper into a name's origin. And why wouldn't that be something you would attempt, anyway, if you are using a name you are somewhat unfamiliar with on your child? Here are a few points to consider when examining Native American names, or actually any name at all, for that matter.