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xvii a note on terms There is no ideal term or agreed upon terminology for the original inhabitants of North America and Australia. I have used tribal nation designations in their original languages when possible. I use American Indian and Native American interchangeably when making more general references for the United States. I refer to Aboriginal people in Australia. Canada’s Indian Act created four categories of people with Indigenous ancestry: treaty Indians, non-treaty Indians, Métis, and Inuit. I describe these in detail in chapter 6. I refer to people of Indigenous heritage in Canada as First Nations and Métis or simply Indigenous. When making broad global references to the first inhabitants of these three modern nations, I use the term Indigenous people. Historically, many settlers referred to groups of American Indians as “tribes.” This term often connoted primitiveness, so many American Indian groups have preferred to call themselves “nations” to designate their sovereign status. They point out that the United States negotiated treaties with them as one nation to another. The status of Indian groups in relation to the U.S. government is complicated. I sometimes use the term nation, or group, but I also use the word tribe. I want to reclaim the term as a valuable way to designate the hundreds of unique cultural groupings of Indigenous people, all of whom have distinct languages and religions that deserve recognition and respect. I use the term white to refer to descendants of Europeans living in the United States, Canada, and Australia. I fully realize that this is an invented racial term and concept that settlers created to distinguish themselves from Indigenous people and some other immigrants. Whiteness conferred great privileges, including entitlement to land, authority to govern, and xviii | a note on terms full citizenship. I sometimes refer to non-Indian, non-Aboriginal, or nonIndigenous people when I wish to include more than just whites. I use the names Bureau of Indian Affairs or bia throughout the manuscript . The United States government set up this agency in 1824 and originally called it the Office of Indian Affairs. Many of its employees referred to it as the “Bureau.” In 1947 it formally became the bia. For clarity, I simply call it the bia for all time periods. ...

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