@Dolemite ideally i think this is what colleges want (people to bring the diversity to campus not just mark a checkbox) but there was this recent buzzfeed video about this girl who got into yale i believe, and she read the notes the admissions people wrote about her application a few years after she had applied. one of the notes said that it would be a good thing to have someone from her town/school (because apparently that town had low income/minorities). yet while her high school was indeed very low income and had many minorities, she was white. and yale hadn’t admitted anybody else from that school, and i think later they did admit another student from there, and again, they were white. even though the white people weren’t representative of the supposed “diversity” that someone from that school supposedly had, the fact that she simply went to that school was enough for them to claim “diversity”
the point im trying to make is that even though perhaps OP isn’t really active in any tribe the way the US thinks native americans should be represented (because you can still have culture and diversity even if you don’t have some official paperwork to tell you you are), the school might not care so much about all the nitty gritty when they might just be content with a check mark.
(though this is in no way saying that just filling in a check mark like hometown or ethnicity is going to get you into yale or is going to always count as diversity, this was just one case. that girl obviously had a bunch of other great qualities to get admitted but that comment that officers wrote in her application was very telling)
i dont really see why somebody can’t say they’re native american for race when that’s what they are. just because they don’t have all that paperwork (that is just a construct the U.S. made) it shouldn’t mean they’re not native. that is a very US-centric way of thinking, just because one government gives you a piece of paper, that shouldn’t invalidate your culture. that is completely absurd.
what else would OP put for the race question? white? other? he’s not. his ancestry is indigenous to south america. of course he will put down latino/hispanic for the ethnicity question though.
or maybe he can put other and if it gives him the option to write what he is specifically
honestly i would just put down native american and if they ask then just clarify that he’s from south america. it’s not out of the ordinary or anything since most all of latin america was colonized at some point and we still have a lot of the indigenous culture there.