This term has become greatly politicized by various factions and political correctness 'police'. In founding documents of the USA, the term native-born was used to define a person's right to seek the office of President of our current constitutional govt.
But some tribal-rights groups are seeking to establish the term as an official definition of being a legal citizen of an established tribe of the North American Indian ethnic groups. But the US federal govt. specifically uses the term 'North American Indian' for govt. purposes.
In the absolute sense, no ethnicity is 'native American'. All genealogies eventually point to an immigration point. But in another sense, anyone born in the Americas can assume the identity of 'native American'.
The term 'Indigenous' is also a relative term and open for debate or context. But in the literal sense anyone born in the American continents has a right to define as native American.
Freedom, Liberty, & the Age of Enlightenment
We can't properly understand the western theories of liberty without a basic study of the 'Age of enlightment' that produced much of the philosophical argument.
The Enlightenment (also known as the Age of Enlightenment or the Age of Reason; in French: le Siècle des Lumières, lit. 'the Century of Lights'; and in German: Aufklärung, 'Enlightenment') was an intellectual and philosophical movement which dominated the world of ideas in Europe during the 18th century, The Century of Philosophy.
The Enlightenment included a range of ideas centered on reason as the primary source of authority and legitimacy, and came to advance ideals like liberty, progress, tolerance, fraternity, constitutional government, and separation of church and state. In France, the central doctrines of les Lumièreswere individual liberty and religious tolerance in opposition to an absolute monarchy and the fixed dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church.
The Enlightenment was marked by an emphasis on the scientific method and reductionism along with increased questioning of religious orthodoxy—an attitude captured by the phrase Sapere aude, "Dare to know".
The Free World
For the past 250 years, 'Free' has become a term of propoganda, as well. If not political or civil freedom, then at least religious freedom, as is the case with the current war on terrorism. But in the name of our fight for freedom, the US has imprisoned vast multitudes. and much of that is based solely on ethnicity. During WW2, the US forced US citizens of Japanese ethnicities to a massive disruption and detainment in 'Relocation Camps' further inland than their west coast communities. Some of those families suffered even while their sons served & died in service to the US military brances.
The phrase has its origin in the 1940s during the Second World War, especially through the anti-fascist Free World magazine and the U.S. propaganda film series Why We Fight. At this time, the term was criticized for including the Soviet Union (USSR), which critics saw as a totalitarian dictatorship. However, the term became more widely used against the USSR and its allies during the 1950s in the Cold War era, when the U.S. depicted a foreign policy based on a struggle between "a democratic alliance and a communist realm set on world domination", according to The Atlantic. The term here was criticised again for including right-wing dictatorships such as Francoist Spain, and Nikita Khrushchev said in the 21st Congress of the Soviet Communist Party that "the so-called free world constitutes the kingdom of the dollar".
Opinion of the Editor
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David Van Risseghem is the Director of Sooner Politics.org. The resource is committed to informing & mobilizing conservative Oklahomans for civic reform. This endeavor seeks to utilize the efforts of all cooperative facets of the Conservative movement...