What Does "Native" Mean?

The word native seems simple until we try to define exactly what it means.

In ordinary English, native can describe someone who was born in a particular place. A person might call himself a native of Idaho, Virginia, Ireland, or France simply because that is where he was born.

But in discussions of American history, immigration, citizenship, and Indigenous peoples, the word often carries very different meanings. At least three separate ideas are frequently compressed into the same word.

Native by Birth

The oldest and broadest meaning is geographic.

A person is native to the place where he or she was born. Dictionaries have long used the word this way, and Americans routinely speak of someone as a "California native," "Texas native," or "native New Yorker."

Under this definition, nativeness does not require ancient ancestry. It describes a person's relationship to a birthplace.

Native by Ancestry

The word can also refer to peoples whose ancestors inhabited a territory before later migrations, settlement, conquest, or colonization.

In the United States, Native American has become a conventional collective term for the Indigenous peoples of the continent. In this sense, Native means considerably more than simply being born somewhere. It refers to historical peoples, communities, cultures, and ancestry extending back before the creation of the United States.

That is a legitimate and important meaning of the word — but it is not its only meaning.

Native by Political or Legal Membership

A third concept is frequently mixed into the debate: citizenship.

Citizenship determines legal membership in a political nation. It establishes rights, protections, and obligations under that nation's laws.

But citizenship and nativeness are not necessarily the same thing.

An immigrant can become an American citizen without having been born in America. Someone born in America can be native-born regardless of where his parents or grandparents were born. Members of federally recognized tribes can simultaneously possess U.S. citizenship and citizenship or membership within their tribal nations.

These are different relationships: birthplace, ancestry, and political membership.

Why the Distinction Matters

Much of the modern argument over who may properly call themselves "native" begins when these definitions are treated as though they were interchangeable.

Consider an American family whose ancestors arrived in Virginia in 1650.

Their descendants may have been born on this continent for ten or twelve generations. They may have no ancestral homeland they personally remember, no foreign citizenship, and no family connection to another country for centuries.

Are those descendants native to America?

Under the ordinary birthplace definition, certainly: someone born in America is native-born.

Under the Indigenous definition, no: their ancestors were not among the peoples living on the continent before European settlement.

Under the citizenship definition, the question is different again. Citizenship concerns membership in the American political nation rather than whether someone's ancestors were the continent's earliest inhabitants.

None of those definitions needs to erase the others.

The problem begins when we silently switch between them.

The Question Behind What Is Native

This website begins with a simple proposition:

"Native" is not a synonym for "Indigenous."

Indigenous peoples have a distinctive historical relationship to North America that should be recognized accurately. But recognizing that history does not require abandoning the ordinary geographic meaning of native when discussing everyone else.

A man born in Ireland can be an Irish native without claiming descent from Ireland's earliest inhabitants.

A woman born in Japan can be a Japanese native without proving that every branch of her ancestry originated there.

And an American whose family has lived in America for generations can be native to America in the geographic sense without claiming to be Native American in the Indigenous sense.

Those statements can coexist.

The more interesting question, therefore, is not whether one group is "really native" and another is not.

It is:

What kind of nativeness are we talking about?

Birth?

Ancestry?

Culture?

Citizenship?

Indigenous status?

Or belonging created through generations of life in a particular place?

Once those distinctions are made explicit, the American debate becomes considerably more interesting — and considerably more complicated.