The Real History of the Word Redskin.

Once upon a time I had a book called Pieds nus sur la terre sacrée (Touch the Earth). I may still have it, somewhere. In this collection of speeches made by Amerindians and compiled by TC McLuhan and illustrated with photographs taken by Edward S. Curtis, the expression “homme rouge” (red man) appeared more than once as far as I remember.

This would be corroborated by the 1854 speech made by Chief Seattle for instance (included in the book), in which he is said to have said, among other words:

To us the ashes of our ancestors are sacred and their resting place is hallowed ground. You wander far from the graves of your ancestors and seemingly without regret. Your religion was written upon tablets of stone by the iron finger of your God so that you could not forget. The Red Man could never comprehend or remember it. Our religion is the traditions of our ancestors — the dreams of our old men, given them in solemn hours of the night by the Great Spirit; and the visions of our sachems, and is written in the hearts of our people.

Seattle (Siʔaɫ) spoke in Lushootseed, which was interpreted on the spot into Chinook Jargon and from that into English. So nobody knows what he said. The published version appeared 33 years later, allegedly from notes taken in English at the time.

Compare English “polack”.

Wikiquotes pussyfoots a little, but essentially reports the Chief Seattle speech, at least in terms of the famous quotations from it, as bogus. “… forgery, devised by television scriptwriter Ted Perry for a historical epic in 1971.”

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Chief_Seattle.

Okay, I hoist the white flag. No, the red flag. Well, I surrender!

Regarding ethnic slurs, there was a sentence in Le Robert dictionary saying that the term “nègre” (negro) was “insulting, except when used by the Blacks themselves”.

@ J. W. Brewer. Of course, I cannot know what Mr. Skinner meant by his wording, but usually a word becomes an ethnic slur because it is used by the outgroup in the offending contexts. If there is a substantial history of white people calling Native Americans “redskins” in denigrating contexts then some of this context might reflect on the word itself. If “redskins” was usually used by white folks to describe how great the Indians were, how they culture was worthy, they traditions needed the respect, etc. then deciding that it is a term of abuse is just umbrage in search of a cause.

there was a sentence in Le Robert dictionary saying that the term “nègre” (negro) was “insulting, except when used by the Blacks themselves”.

LH, I remember discussions some years ago about the meaning of some French words, when I realized that my Petit Robert was ancient (1968) compared to yours and some others. I can’t find my dictionary at the moment to see what, if any, comment attached to the word, but I think that the current use of nègre in France has been influenced by the increasingly derogatory connotation of the N-word in the US. The word has not always been derogatory, otherwise the first French admirers of African art would not have chosen to call it L’Art Nègre. When I was young it was considered more respectful to use Noir (written with a capital) instead of nègre, but I never considered the word as particularly derogatory. Of course, as more and more people used Noir. nègre would have been used less and less by respectful people, and it would have remained in the vocabulary of racists.

When translating into English, there is a problem since the word is (or at least was) much less derogatory than the American N-word. Some time ago I read an article about a hero of the French revolution, the son of a planter and a slave, whom Napoleon “called a nigger”, Since Napoleon was speaking French, this cannot be the word he used! “Negro”, now old-fashioned in the US, would have been a better translation.

Slightly separate point: the pre-European-colonization population of North America was both culturally and linguistically diverse (yes, Prof. Greenberg, your position is noted for the record). I don’t take Ives/Skinner to be saying that words/phrases calqueable as “redskin” were used in all or even a majority of those languages. If I were an L1 speaker of, oh, let’s say Choctaw, just to have an example, and my language didn’t use that sort of expression, I don’t see why I should give a damn that the French may have picked it up from some random Algonquin language once spoken a thousand miles away from where my ancestors lived at the time (or, even worse, from a language spoken by a rival ethnolinguistic group with whom my ancestors were habitually at war and for whom my ancestors had a highly unflattering exonym).

Of course, there’s a sense in which no Amerind language needed a word specifically referring to Amerinds-as-a-whole as contrasted with whites, blacks, etc. before they had contact with those new arrivals to the neighborhood, and I suppose it’s possible that many Amerind languages thus borrowed/calqued such a word from a neighboring language which had already had such contact once the need arose, and that neighboring language might in turn have done the same and so on and so forth all the way back to the Atlantic coast.

I fear that in an effort to avoid being overly verbose I may have blundered into being overly cryptic. There are some substantial number of people who do not particularly wish to see the name of the football team changed, many of whom are among that subset of the population from which the football team derives its revenue. That is one of the primary reasons why the name has not, in fact, been changed. I personally do not feel that being open-minded about the possibility that so-and-so might be okay with the team-name status quo is on a par with an accusation with being a puppet of the Illuminati (although one would not expect the Illuminati to allow so valuable a mind-control resource as Slate to fall into the hands of their rivals, would one?), and I don’t really care whether Skinner is a member of this group of people or not.

But separately, it might well be the case that Skinner affirmatively agrees with the team-name-condemners but thinks it unscholarly, unjournalistic and/or undignified to say so. Once you’ve specified your position that issue X, about which you’re writing, is conceptually separate from issue Y, you shouldn’t need to reassure your readers that you’re definitely not the sort of horrible person who might not agree with them about issue Y. Or it may be the case that Skinner just has no particularly strong opinion on the name-change issue one way or another and/or has a complicated view that couldn’t be made explicit without undue digression.

I will say that on further reflection I am open to the possibility that “rightly” as used by Skinner in this context may be just a filler word not intended to add substantive nuance.

http://anthropology.si.edu/goddard/redskin.pdf is Goddard’s article, which is well worth the reading and does seem quite exhaustive, with only a teensy-weensy bit of handwaving when he needs to explain away fixed phrases in certain Amerind languages that might translate more like “brownskin” than “redskin.” (Note that “red” as a general racial term pops up substantially earlier and in a different region of the continent than “redskin” does.)

Am I the only one here who’s heard words called offensive out of pure ignorance? I’ve had angry undergraduates tell me that “rule of thumb” should be banned as a reference to wifebeating, specifically to an alleged law allowing a husband to beat his wife as long as the stick was no thicker than his thumb. Some site I read several years ago (not this one – I just looked) did the research and showed (as I recall) that this is complete hogwash, a made-up etymology, and that the phrase refers to (e.g.) carpenters and shoemakers judging how wide to cut something by measuring roughly with their thumbs, and pointers holding up their thumbs to judge the proportions of distant objects. Should we feel obligated to stop using a useful turn of phrase because it offends some ignorant people? (Too late: this site uses or quotes the phrase three times.)

A lot of people believe that ‘nitty-gritty’ refers to slave ships and ‘picnic’ to lynching: should we stop using those words, even though those etymologies are utterly false? I can get along without ‘nitty-gritty’, but what else can you call a ‘picnic’?

Maybe if the word sounds really wrong, we should. If ‘niggardly’ was ever in my active vocabulary, I have long since deleted it as likely to cause offense to the lexicographically uninformed, but I would strongly object to anyone who proposed editing Shakespeare and other authors to delete it from their texts. Am I wrong?

Compare my “Glaswegian”.

“Compare my “Glaswegian”.

Compare “Yank”.

I think there is a duty not to offend people, but it is a duty of imperfect obligation, like alms: that is, everyone must decide for themselves how much is enough. There are probably some people who would see the shoes I’m about to go outside in as an offense against propriety (their replacements are in the mail, I hope), but frankly I do not care what such people think.

ObConsider: Consider “sociology.”

I find it frankly hard to swallow that the originator of the metaphor RED IS NATIVE AMERICAN was a Native American. The first use of white in the ethnic sense in English that the OED records was in 1604, and it appears in a translation from the Spanish:

E. Grimeston tr. J. de Acosta Nat. & Morall Hist. Indies ii. xi. 106 Under the same line [the Equator, I suppose] … lies a part of Peru, and of the new kingdome of Grenado, which..are very temperate Countries, … and the inhabitants are white.

If this one is doubtful, the next is not:

1680 C. Ness Compl. Church-hist. 27 The White Line, (the Posterity of Seth,) … the black Line the Cursed brood of Cain.

Until shown otherwise, I will continue to think that red was a term first used by whites, though not necessarily derogatory in itself; as I have noted before, any term used for something despised tends to become derogatory, however neutral it starts out as.

Pre-contact Natives wouldn’t need a generic word for ‘Native Americans’ other than their word for ‘person’. of any kind. Still less would they be likely to use a color-based one, as theirs was the only skin color they knew. Europeans were already using such words, not perhaps before contact, but substantially before any of Goddard’s sources. If francophones, for example, chose the RED metaphor, Natives would be quite likely to pick it up and render it literally, all the more so as we find it in unrelated American languages. Compare Bloomfield’s firewater example.

(How nice it is to be able to link to a specific comment!)

That says (citations omitted):

The first uses [i.e., recorded uses] of the term red as a racial label that Shoemaker found are from 1725. In that year, a Taensa chief talking to a French Capuchin priest in Mobile recounted an origin story about a “white man”, a “red man”, and a “black man”, and a Chickasaw chief meeting with the English Commissioner for Indian Affairs at Savanna Town referred to “White people” and “red people”.

But what is not said, and perhaps not known, is whether the conversations were in Natchez (which the Taensa spoke) and Chickasaw, or in French and English. (Obviously they were recorded in European languages.) If the latter, they are no evidence at all for the existence of the metaphor in Native languages first. Nor is this explanation probative:

Robert Vézina cites Jean-Bernard Bossu (1768), who quotes a Natchez elder as referring to “tous les hommes rouge”, explaining that “C’est ainsi que ces Sauvages s’appellent pour se distinguer des Européens qui sont blancs, & des Africains qui sont noirs.”

That shows only that RED IS NATIVE AMERICAN had been adopted by the Natchez by 1768, not that either they or any other Natives originated it.

No, better evidence than this will be needed to establish that Natives invented the metaphor, and the use of WHITE IS EUROPEAN, BLACK IS AFRICAN in European languages more than a century before is at the very least suggestive.

If the all-caps notation is intended à la Lakoff, the order should be reversed: NATIVE AMERICAN IS RED. I’m not sure if this kind of thing even counts as a metaphor in conceptual metaphor theory, though.

Michael Hendry: Le dernier des Mohicans has long been popular in France, as part of youth literature. It is very likely that Rimbaud read it as a boy.

I said that Peaux-Rouges sounds very old-fashioned to me, and I would never use it to refer to contemporary native people. Obviously Le Monde , or someone there, does not agree.

A Navajo woman from Tony Hillerman’s novel Talking God:

“The first time I went to see Henry Highhawk, I couldn’t find his place at first. I walked right past it, and then back again. There was a car parked up the block a ways with a man sitting in it. He was staring at me, so I noticed him. Medium to small apparently. Maybe forty-five or so. Red hair, a lot of freckles, sort of a red face.” She paused and glanced at Chee with an attempt at a smile. “Do you ever wonder why they call us redskins?” she asked.

There’s also Goscinny and Uderzo’s pre-Asterix hero Oumpah-Pah, whose first (1958) adventure was Oumpah-Pah le Peau-Rouge. I’ve never seen any of the albums but he seems to have been an admirable sort, like Asterix but better-looking.

Also, speaking as a former Redskins fan and former DC resident myself, given what the current ownership has done to the team and its reputation, I consider that the real “Washington Redskins” ceased to exist in the mid-1990s. A name change is well past due.

“I find it frankly hard to swallow that the originator of the metaphor RED IS NATIVE AMERICAN was a Native American. The first use of white in the ethnic sense in English that the OED records was in 1604, and it appears in a translation from the Spanish:”

John, that analogy disproves the point you are trying to make. The Spanish are European, “white” – so white that the name for the dish “Moors and Christians” is based on that whiteness.

In Papua New Guinea, the very dark-skinned people of Bougainville (= North Solomons) refer to the people of mainland New Guinea as “redskins” as in this account of World War II: Redskins Trapped in Bougainville.

As I suspect I have mentioned before in a slightly different context, if you look at Japanese woodblock prints from the first few decades post the 1850ish re-engagement with the outside world, “white” foreigners are typically not depicted as paler-faced than the locals but are often depicted as relatively red-faced, presumably representing what we would think of as a ruddy or rosy-cheeked complexion. But I don’t know if the Japanese lexicon conformed to the visual arts in this regard.

Épater is too wussy. What one does as a Leninist to the bourgeoisie is écraser it:

Tant qu’il y a des classes, liberté et égalité des classes sont une duperie bourgeoise. Le prolétariat prend le pouvoir, devient la classe dominante, brise le parlementarisme bourgeois et la démocratie bourgeoise, écrase la bourgeoisie, écrase toutes les tentatives de toutes les autres classes pour revenir au capitalisme, donne la liberté et l’égalité véritables aux travailleurs (ce qui n’est réalisable qu’avec l’abolition de la propriété privée des moyens de production), leur donne non seulement des « droits », mais la jouissance reélle de ce qui a été ôté à la bourgeoisie.

I would be curious what percentage of the current population of California thinks of “digger” as primarily a reference to a particular group of Indians (pejorative or otherwise), versus e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diggers_(theater), who were well-known habitues of San Francisco back in the Sixties or even their namesake the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diggers. I can see why a botanical reference book generated by a Berkeley professor (which apparently pushes the renaming of the pine in question) would reflect the particular social concerns and anxieties of Berkeley professors, but I don’t know that that’s really representative of Calfornia English-speakers more general.

Merci Etienne. I had never heard this about Souriquois, although I had seen the word. The Basque link makes sense, as in barachois from a Basque word. But what about Iroquois and other words in -ois?

(Was your commented supposed to link to an article?)

Treesong: There’s also Goscinny and Uderzo’s pre-Asterix hero Oumpah-Pah, whose first (1958) adventure was Oumpah-Pah le Peau-Rouge.

Just as Astérix is a Gaul living 2000 years ago, not a modern Frenchman, Oumpah-Pah is most likely a “Red Indian” of past centuries, like “Hawkeye” and others, not a contemporary Native North American.

Perhaps in my comment on the word Peau-Rouge I should have said that it reflects an older reality, and is not used to refer to a modern context.

JWB: if you look at Japanese woodblock prints from the first few decades post the 1850ish re-engagement with the outside world, “white” foreigners are typically not depicted as paler-faced than the locals but are often depicted as relatively red-faced, presumably representing what we would think of as a ruddy or rosy-cheeked complexion.

Years ago when still a student I saw on French TV an interview with a young man who had spent some time in Japan. He related a conversation with a Japanese counterpart who kept saying “We white people .., we white people…” After a while the Frenchman said “If you are white, what am I?” and the Japanese answered “Oh, you people are pink”.

Indeed many Japanese have very pale faces, without a trace of pink, and some women still wear white makeup, as do actors in some traditional plays.

There is a lot of sun in Egypt.

Marie-Lucie (and no, there was and is no link!), John Cowan: actually, Bakker has argued for a pidgin Basque etymology of “Iroquois” (which looks much more satisfactory than any of the alternatives I have seen), as deriving from HIL(O) “kill” + KOA “nation”, i.e. “Nation of Killers”. A suitable name, from the vantage point of Algonquian speakers further North, and indeed many of the Algonquian exonyms for the Iroquois meant “snake nation” or the like. It has been suggested (by an Algonquianist whose name will perhaps come back to me after I’ve sent this message) that the raids and ambushes of the Iroquois, relying heavily on the element of surprise, were perceived by their Algonquian-speaking victims/neighbors as something similar to a snake attack (i.e. an unpredictable and deadly surprise), leading to their calling the Iroquois the “snake people”.

Etienne: By “Algonquian exonym” I meant “exonym used by the Algonquians”.

Okay, I hoist the white flag. No, the red flag.

Satanas, I mean Siganus: would that be the red flag of international socialism, or the earlier red flag meaning “No quarter taken or given”? Blood, in any case.

ryssä
Polack

Also shquiptar / šiptar.

In Serbo-Croatian crvenokožac is definitely Fenimore Cooper territory, but at least until recently referring to “the red race” (and “the yellow race”) was considered perfectly normal, acceptable for school books.

I absolutely support the push for renaming, but I don’t like the recent trend to refer to the word only as the r-word Do people really feel better reading about the R-word debate rather than the Redskins debate? Maybe some do, and I just don’t get it. Still, it seems like this sort of thing could get confusing, depending on context, since there’s at least one other taboo r-word around, and others might be joining them in the future.

In my experience, “the r-word” usually refers to *retard* or *retarded*.

Etienne, January 10, 2014: actually, Bakker has argued for a pidgin Basque etymology of “Iroquois” (which looks much more satisfactory than any of the alternatives I have seen), as deriving from HIL(O) “kill” + KOA “nation”, i.e. “Nation of Killers”.

And as of March 2019, that’s at least partly accepted by the OED:

Etymology: < French Iroquois, †Yroquois, noun and adjective (1603 as Irocois ), probably < a first element of uncertain origin (see note) + Basque -koa , suffix with the sense ‘those of’ (apparently formed in the context of the 16th-cent. Basque-led whaling expeditions to the Gulf of St Lawrence), with remodelling of the ending after French -ois (see -ese suffix).
The identity of the first element is uncertain and disputed. It may be a Basque element (for which there are several suggestions, all posing phonological or semantic problems), but an (unidentified) word or name in a local Algonquian language has also been proposed.

Similar formations, apparently with the same suffix, are cited in quot. 1609; of these, Souriquois (a former European name for the Micmac people) is apparently ultimately < Basque zuri white + -koa.

Wiktionary includes this among several theories. So far, no other dictionaries have followed suit.

Despite the constant pressure and awareness of American culture, the word homo in Hebrew is still the standard, neutral equivalent to gay in US English. Lagging but present is גֵּאֶה ge’e, literally ‘proud’, echoing the English word.

чёрный itself is a slur but not one usually applied to people of African ancestry (regarding which it would probably be a non-sequitur).

I think it is applied to them, both as a slur by haters – and as a neutral term by people influenced by English usage. In both cases the speaker must at least have one black person in sight to discuss, which does not happen often in Russia (I mean, you do meet black people in Moscow metro – but in a small town a black tourist is an event that people will discuss).

Two issues with the word:
– first “[colour] person” is not normally understood as “a person whose skin is [colour]”.
Cf. Yesenin’s “black man”.
– second, nominalized adjectives are very likely to be used informally and to pick up emotional shades. Yásnaya, if I used it as a name in Russian would be the only high-register word used this way that I can think of.

I wrote about it, but as my comments to both points began to expand, I decided to post a shortened version, and compactify the rest first. I wrote:

“A black man walked down the street” in Russian sounds scary but it won’t make me think about skin. Black silhouette? Or Black as Gandalf is Grey? An African? Black dress? This order.
30 years ago the third option would be the 7th, not third. I guess for some* speakers it becoems the first.

Yes, we have a “white man”, for me it is someone in a pith helmet rather than someone with white skin. His skin could have gotten definitely tanned. I think it must be the same in English. English speakers are more used to the concept of race but their ‘black’ is our негр I think (just with different connotation), rather than a descriptive term for skin with enough melanin.

(slightly edited)
*”some” emphasizes that ‘not for me’, they even can be the majority. Must depend on age.

“A black man walked down the street” in Russian sounds scary but it won’t make me think about skin. Black silhouette? Or Black as Gandalf is Grey? An African? Black dress? This order.
30 years ago the third option would be the 7th, not third.

Not sure about 7th, but for me it’s definitely lower than third. I would probably have thought of someone painted black before an African; it’s that much not about (racial) skin color.

Mange tak!

Two issues with the word. First, I have to admit, I do not understand it. I wondered if I get its derivation right when i was 7 and I still have the same question.

The short adjective is chernomaz. I would be normal if maz were a noun:/ For a verb an adjectival suffix is added.

bystr-o-nog – quick-footed. (adj.), noga “foot”
bystr-o-xod-en – fast-walking. (adj.), xod-it’ “to walk”
skor-o-xod – fast-walker. (n.)

So I felt like I am missing something about the root. The word likely imitates chumaz-yj, a word of unclear etymology with a similar meaning “dirty”. Vasmer has an entry “chumaza” (noun) – it is not used today.
I wonder if chernomazyj is calque of a foreign word, sharing the source with sortsmusker influenced by chumazyj and affected by folk etymology.

I am sure that modern Russian racists use it sometimes, but I do not think this long word is their insult of choice

The insult of choice that I (vaguely) recall from racist discussions overheard in middle school (ca. 2003) is нигер, probably borrowed directly from English. I have no idea if it’s still used.

Meanwhile, the “insulting formation” I obliquely referred to in my earlier comment is черножопый “black-assed”, which is of course automatically an impolite word just from the inclusion of an impolite root.

 
EDIT:

за неопрятность

See also: чернь, previously чёрный люд or чёрные люди [sic!], apparently originally referring to a particular subclass of peasants but at least in the shortened form more recently just “uneducated mob”.
I’m not sure of the etymology [i.e. why were they called that, and in particular where the colour came in]; Wikipedia does not appear to mention it.

Ah, and if this (possibly) have not been discussed here – I saw in Siberian (18th century, I am not sure about modern usage – maybe it is still so) chronicle “Russia” in the sense “the land to the West beyond the mountains”, and Cossacks, they also use “Russian” in the sense “people from central Russia, not Cossacks.

Someone (modern) also told me about his rural Southern Russian neighbour or freind who travelled to central Russia, stayed in a peasant house and returned back deeply shocked: “they keep a cow in the house!!!!????????????????”. (we do…).

He also was telling terrifying stories about cow dung in milk…

“These phrases were part of a racial vocabulary that Indians often used to designate themselves in opposition to others whom they (like the Europeans) called black, white, and so on.”

Another famous exmaple of “red” is Sahel (where it is contrasted to black though). And Semitic langauges starting from Adam.