The following is taken from an email I wrote:

Just a few thousand years ago, we were all descended from the same place. I mean human civilization is really not that old. Only about 5,000 years, that's only about 250 generations. That's all it took to make people in different parts of the world look noticeably different. At the rate things are going, at least in California, I think that before we know it the races will mix back together as more and more people intermarry. Maybe this won't happen in our lifetimes, but imagine in 20 generations. No one will be "white" anymore. Everyone will be like 1/8 this and 1/4 that. I guess we'll all be Americans, but hopefully race won't matter as much as it does today. Gosh, sometimes I wish I could see what the world will be like long after I'm dead. That's gotta be the biggest mystery. It's something that you just can't predict. I mean you can predict that the sun will burn out in about 5 billion years, but you can't predict how many more years or centuries the United States will last. If the last millenium is any indication, the present set of countries that make up this world is not as stable as we like to think....

Native American is kind of an arbitrary term. Even those people we call Native Americans are not truly native to America. I could be wrong about this, but I don't think human beings are native to America. Didn't humans originate in Europe and then traverse the globe after that? This would mean that the only native americans are the plants and animals that originated here. On the other extreme, anyone born in America could be called a Native American, but I guess the term Native American does't take either extreme, but something in the middle, which seems a little bit arbitrary.