How to identify as being Native American while not being of aboriginal descent?

Question

I write for government entities in the supply chain and manufacturing fields. These days it is a big deal to identify what nationality you are. The government wants to discontinue buying from adversarial countries and prefer American Made in order to control Intellectual Property (IP), counterfeit and substandard products. That’s why we have to identify who we are. In my proposals, I have been writing Native American, so they know that the people in our company are all born Americans.

There are also distinctions that the government looks for so they can buy from small business, women-owned, native american, veteran-owned, etc. Recently I had someone from outside our company look over one of my proposals and he said, why don’t we identify ourselves as a Native American distinction to get an additional advantage for our proposal? None of us in the company are ‘Indian.’ That’s when I realized that maybe I should use American Native. Here are the definitions of both:

Native American - a member of any of the indigenous peoples of the western hemisphere especially: a Native American of North America and especially the U.S.

American Native – this phrase is not in the dictionary.

The term American Indian is in the dictionary, but it is not used: American Indian – “a member of any of the aboriginal peoples of the Americas, especially of subarctic North America, excluding the Inuit, Yupik, and Aleut.”

What should I use to distinguish our company as born in the USA without saying born in the USA?

Answer 1

There is an adjective used to show that one was born in a given country etc:

native-born [adjective]:

born in the place or country indicated

• a native-born Australian

[Collins]

Hence native-born Americans.

(Then there's the problem that 'Americans' is polysemous; CambridgeDictionary. But doubtless the default sense is US-specific.)

Answer 2

For goodness sake, stop using "Native American" to mean "Born in America". That's been incorrect for decades. Fix any of your company's literature that uses the phrase and do it now.

When talking about people it's OK to use "American born". It's not explicitly in the dictionary because there is no additional meaning not conveyed by the two individual words.

With companies "American born" means nothing. A company could be founded in America but now owned by the Russian government. Don't use the phrase. You might consider "100% American owned", or talk about where your company's work is done, or where materials are sourced.