O.K., so what kind of Indians are we talking about here, those from India or those from the Americas? I've known a variation of that song all my life and assumed it was about so-called American Indians, but if Agatha Christy's book was the origin of the song then, being British, was she perhaps not referring to natives of India?

Frankly, given the problems associated with the use of the term "Indian" to refer to Native American peoples, I'm surprised that in all the P.C. talk so far no one has seen fit to mention it, especially since it was the topic of the thread (if indeed the song is about [sic] American "injuns" to begin with).

I realize that centuries of habit are hard to break, but American Indian is an obvious misnomer that ought to have been done away with long ago, since all the cultures referred to are natives of what was later called America and obviously have nothing to do with the sub-continent of India other than the geographical ignorance of White Europeans. Furthermore, now that there is a fairly large population of Indians from India in the U.S. we are faced with the absurdity of having two totally different cultural groups being called by the same name. I suppose that to be more semantically correct, Native Americans would have to be referred to as American Indians and Americans from India as Indian-Americans (along the lines of other hypenated immigrant groups). However, this seems so prone to confusion and so absurdly ridiculous a solution, that we all should just start referring to Native Americans by that name and drop the incorrect term Indian once and for all.