Cultural Identity
...reasing efforts within the American Indian population to regulate identity and access to resources. Unlike other ethnic groups, who are eager to expand their definition and increase their official numbers, many American Indians seek actively to regulate ethnic group boundaries. She stated that before European contact, it was easy to answer the question "Who is Indian?" because nobody was. "Indian" is a European-derived word and concept. She also believes that prior to contact the indigenous inhabitants of North America were simply members of their own sociopolitical and cultural groups—what later came to be labeled "tribes." In her opinion Europeans used their own values and ideas, conceptual categories, and explanatory frameworks to define American Indians, and their definitions eventually became codified in United States federal laws. Whether classifying people collectively as "Indian tribes" or individually according to "blood quantum," the federal government, through its judicial system, has defined American Indians in unique and contradictory ways. In my opinion multiculturalism, ethnicity and diversity have been hot issues throughout the '90s, as every University student has probably discovered. Gonzalez’s philosophies on ethnic switching were particularly interesting for me. I really had no idea such a phenomenon occurred, let alone all over the United States. It was also interesting to note that the idea of ethnic switching is extremely detrimental for the Native American, as more privileges are taken away by those who are not as needy as most. Today she said that there are 2.4 million full blooded Native American living in the United States, but there are 4.1 million including those of mixed ethnicity who claim that they are true Native...