Indian has always been a misnomer for the earliest inhabitants of the Americas. Many people have come to prefer Native American both as a corrective to Columbus’s famous mistake and as a means of avoiding the Hollywood stereotypes so often associated with Indian. But while Native American has gained popularity in many circles, Indian remains in wide use as well, leaving room for choice in most situations.
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There are solid arguments in favor of Native American. It eliminates any confusion between indigenous American peoples and the inhabitants of India, making it the preferred term in many formal or official contexts. It is also historically accurate, despite the insistence by some that Indians are no more native to America than anyone else since their ancestors are assumed to have migrated here from Asia. But one sense of native is “being the original inhabitants of a particular place,” and Native Americans’ claim to being the original inhabitants of the Americas predates all others by some twelve to twenty and possibly forty thousand years.
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Accuracy aside, however, the choice between the two terms is often made on political grounds. For many, Native American is the only choice for expressing a sense of pride in or an attitude of respect toward the indigenous cultures of America; Indian is seen as wrong and potentially offensive. For others, Native American smacks of bureaucracy and the attempt to manipulate language for political purposes. In this view Indian is the natural English term, its inaptness made irrelevant by five centuries of consistent usage.
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It should be noted that this controversy has subsided somewhat in recent years, and it is now common to find the two terms used interchangeably in the same piece of writing. Furthermore, the issue has never been particularly divisive between Indians and non-Indians. While generally welcoming the respectful tone of Native American, Indian writers have continued to use the older name at least as often as the newer one.
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Note that Native American is not generally hyphenated as either a noun or an adjective.
