Squaw

Squaw is an English language loan-word, used as a noun or adjective, derived from the eastern Algonquian morpheme meaning 'woman' that appears in numerous Algonquian languages[1] and is variously transcribed in English as "squa", "skwa", "esqua", "sqeh", "skwe", "que", "kwa", "ikwe", "exkwew", "xkwe", and a number of other variants. Some[2] indigenous North Americans consider the term to be offensive.[3][4][5]

Algonquian language origins

The words for "woman" in the various Algonquian languages derive from Proto-Algonquian *[eθkweːwa]. In the daughter languages, the first consonant sound has variously changed to /s/ (Narragansett squaw, Cree iskwēw), /x/ (Lenape xkwē < əxkwew), or been lost (Shawnee ekwēwa, Ojibwe ikwe). The pronunciation squaw or skwa is found in the northerly Eastern Algonquian languages in New England and Quebec.

"'Bourgeois' W---r, and His Squaw" Drawing shows a white trapper and his Native American wife/partner.

One of its earliest appearances in print is "the squa sachim, or Massachusets queen" in Mourt's Relation (1622), one of the first chronicles of the Plymouth colony (Goddard 1997). William Wood similarly defined "Squaw - a woman" in his list, "A Small Nomenclature of the Indian Language," in New England's Prospect (Wood 1637). Roger Williams, founder of the Rhode Island colony, in his book A Key Into the Language of America (1643), published several words that exemplify the use of this morpheme in the Narragansett language:

Squàws – woman, Squàwsuck – women, Squásese – A little Girle, Sauncksquûaog – Queenes, Keegsquaw – A Virgin or Maide, Segousquaw – A Widdow.

Algonquian linguists and historians have confirmed that the term appears in almost all of the Algonquian languages, through such examples as "Narragansett squaw, probably with an abbreviation of eskwaw, cognate with the Delaware (Lenape) ochqueu, the Chippewa ikwe, the Cree iskwew, etc." (Hodge 1910).

The Saint Francis Abenaki Chief Joseph Laurent (1884) illustrated the neutral usage of the term among Abenaki speakers to refer to both Native and non-Native women. As a suffix it means "wife," as in "Sôgmò; —skua," translated as "A chief; chief's wife." Other examples are

Nôkskuasis – A young little girl. Patlihóskua – A nun. Kinjamesiskua – A queen. Awanochwi-skuaso – The queen [cards]. Kuibekiskua – A lady (woman) from Quebec. Pastoniskua – An American woman. Iglismôniskua – An English woman. Illôdaskua – An Irish woman.

The Abenakis' word for a queen, "Kinjamesiskua," recorded as "Kinjames'isqua" by another Abenaki author (Masta 1932), literally translates as "King James' wife."

In 1940, the anthropologist Frank Speck noted the appearance of this morpheme in various terms in the Penobscot language, including the following.

nȣkskwe'sis = girl, nȣkskwe = young woman, na'kskwe'si'zak = a call for women to come and dance, Mi'kmaskwe'sis = a little Micmac woman, agwuskwe'zun = women's head coverings, gwanuskwa'kwsȣsak = long, peaked hood-like caps so characteristic of the northern peoples (Speck 1940).
Portrait of a young Choctaw woman, 1850

Some authors, such as Jonathan Periam describing American Indian corn-growing practices of the early 19th century in Illinois, used the word repeatedly,[6] and nonchalantly. Frederick Webb Hodge from the Smithsonian Institution Bureau of Ethnology, in his Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico (1910), noted the widespread usage of this term across the region:

As a term for woman squaw has been carried over the length and breadth of the United States and in Canada, and is even in use by Indians on the reservations of the W., who have taken it from the whites.

The adjective form of squaw has been widely applied to indigenous plants used by Native peoples as medicine specific to female complaints. The Oxford English Dictionary notes:

In names of plants, as squaw-berry, the edible berry of one of several shrubs, esp. the bear-berry, Arctostaphylos uva-ursi, an evergreen prostrate creeper; squaw corn, a variety of maize having soft grains of various colours; squaw huckleberry, -root, -weed, whortleberry (see quots.). Also squaw-bush, -carpet, -flower, -grass, -mint, -vine (OED 1989).

The Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico lists several such plants that are still prized by both traditional herbalists and modern pharmaceutical companies.

After the squaw have been named: Squawberry (the partridge berry), squaw bush (in various parts of the country, Cornus stolonifera, C. sericea, and C. canadensis) ... squaw flower (Trillium erectum, also called squaw root) ... squaw mint (the American pennyroyal), squawroot (in different parts of the country, Trillium erectum, the black and the blue cohosh, Conopholis americana, and other plants) ... squaw vine (a New England name for the partridge berry) (Hodge 1910).

Controversy

Early derogatory uses

In some 19th- and 20th-century texts squaw is used or perceived as derogatory. Most of these uses are not sexual. One author, for example, referred to "the universal 'squaw' - squat, angular, pig-eyed, ragged, wretched, and insect-haunted" (Steele 1883). Squaw also became a derogatory adjective used against some men, in "squaw man," meaning either "a man who does woman's work" (similar to other languages) or "a white man married to an Indian woman and living with her people" (Hodge 1910). (This was a popular literary stereotype, as in The Squaw Man.)

In a western novel by Max Brand (1926), a male character asks a female character about her intentions:

"And follow this fortune hunter like a—like a squaw behind her man?"
"Like a squaw," she answered steadily, "if you choose to use that word!"

The writer Mourning Dove (1927), of Colville, Okanagan and Irish ancestry, showed her mixed-race heroine's opinion of the word:

"If I was to marry a white man and he would dare call me a 'squaw'—as an epithet with the sarcasm that we know so well—I believe that I would feel like killing him."

Perhaps in view of such uses as those above, one early-20th-century dictionary of American usage called squaw "a contemptuous term" (Crowell 1928).[7]

The activist LaDonna Harris, telling of her work in empowering Native American schoolchildren in the 1960s at Ponca City, Oklahoma, recounted:

"We tried to find out what the children found painful about school [causing a very high dropout rate]. (...) The children said that they felt humiliated almost every day by teachers calling them "squaws" and using all those other old horrible terms" (Harris 2000).

In this case the term seems to have been regularly applied to girls in the lower grades of the elementary school, long before their puberty.

Claims of obscene meaning

Some but not all Native American condemnation of "squaw" results from claims that it comes from a word for the vagina.[8]

An early comment in which "squaw" appears to have a sexual meaning is from the Canadian writer Pauline Johnson (1892), whose father was a Mohawk chief. She wrote about the title character in An Algonquin Maiden by G. Mercer Adam and A. Ethelwyn Wetherald:

Poor little Wanda! not only is she non-descript and ill-starred, but as usual the authors take away her love, her life, and last and most terrible of all, reputation; for they permit a crowd of men-friends of the hero to call her a "squaw" and neither hero nor authors deny that she is a squaw. It is almost too sad when so much prejudice exists against the Indians, that any one should write up an Indian heroine with such glaring accusations against her virtue, and no contradictory statements from either writer, hero or circumstance.

Explicit statements that "squaw" came from a word meaning "female genitals" gained currency in the 1970s. Perhaps the first example was in Sanders and Peek (1973):

That curious concept of 'squaw', the enslaved, demeaned, voiceless childbearer, existed and exists only in the mind of the non-Native American and is probably a French corruption of the Iroquois word otsiskwa [also spelled ojiskwa] meaning 'female sexual parts', a word almost clinical both denotatively and connotatively. The corruption suggests nothing about the Native American's attitude toward women; it does indicate the wasichu's [white man's[9]] view of Native American women in particular if not all women in general.

The controversy increased when Oprah Winfrey invited the Native American activist Suzan Harjo onto her show in 1992. Harjo said on the show that "squaw is an Algonquin Indian word meaning vagina." As a result of these claims, some Native people have taken to spelling the word sq***, or calling it the "s-word" (Bright n.d.). This purported etymology has been widely adopted as the rationale for removing the word from maps, road signs, history books, and other public uses (Adams 2000).

However, according to Ives Goddard, the curator and senior linguist in the anthropology department of the Smithsonian Institution, this statement is not true (Bright n. d.; Goddard 1997). The word was borrowed as early as 1621 from the Massachusett word squa (Cutler 1994; Goddard 1996, 1997), one of many variants of the Proto-Algonquian *eθkwe·wa[10] (Goddard 1997); in those languages it meant simply "young woman." Although Algonquian linguists and historians (e.g. Goddard 1997, Bruchac 1999) have rejected Harjo's proposed etymology, it has been repeated (without citing etymologies) by several journalists and the entertainer Oprah Winfrey.

Goddard also writes:

I have no doubt that some speakers of Mohawk sincerely believe that it is from their word ojískwa 'vagina' (though I know that other Mohawks laugh at the whole idea), but the resemblance (if there is one) is entirely accidental. "Vagina" was not a meaning that was ever known to the original users of the word, and although it appears in a college anthology published in 1973 (Random House, 2000), it was not widely known before Suzan Harjo's appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 1992."

Goddard does not rule out the possibility that the false etymology could have been believed by some non-Mohawks and thus does not rebut statements by Native people who trace the etymology to local memories of insulting language (e.g., Hagengruber 2006).

Some anecdotal evidence has also been found by Mohawk linguists that suggests that "otsikwa" may actually be a modern slang term for "cornmeal mush" (referred to by Palmer 2001).

Current status

Apart from the linguistic debate, the word "squaw" has become offensive to many modern Native Americans because of usage that demeans Native women, ranging from condescending images (e.g., picture postcards depicting "Indian squaw and papoose") to racialized epithets (Green 1975). It is similar in tone to the words "Negress" and "Jewess," (Adams 2000) which treat non-white women as if they were second-class citizens or exotic objects.

Some Native women have attempted to address this problem by calling attention to what they consider the appropriate indigenous context of this word (Palmer 2001) and proposing to reclaim it as "appropriate, traditional, and honorable" (Bruchac 1999). During a featured panel discussion titled "Squaw: Algonkian Linguistics and Colonial Politics" at the "All Women of Red Nations" Women's Studies Conference at Southern Connecticut State University in 2001, Native women from the Abenaki, Schaghticoke, and Wampanoag tribes stressed the need for accurate understandings of colonial histories, and respect for linguistic differences, to avoid misrepresenting and disrespecting Algonquian language recovery efforts (Bruchac, Fermino, and Richmond 2001).

The term has long been used by some western tribes such as the Navajo (or Dine), who practice a ceremonial "squaw dance." Some Native women have noted, however, that it seems inappropriate to use eastern Algonquian words to describe Native women of western tribes (Bruchac 1999, Mihuesah 2003).

Reflecting efforts to be more culturally sensitive, several dictionaries now warn that squaw is frequently considered to be, can be, or is offensive (NSOED, Merriam-Webster, and American Heritage, respectively).

Renaming placenames and terms with squaw in them

Other Native people would like to see the word eliminated altogether regardless of its Algonquian origins and etymology.[11] This desire has inspired a number of local initiatives, many controversial, to change the hundreds of placenames across America that contain squaw.[12]

Notes

  1. Deborah Pelletier, Terminology Guide: Research on Aboriginal Heritage, Library and Archives, Canada, 2012. (PDF archived at internet archive) (Available on docplayer). Accessed Sept. 24, 2016.
  2. Vincent Schilling, "The Word ‘Squaw’: Offensive or Not?", Indian Country Today, 1/31/2014. Accessed Sept. 24, 2016.
  3. Arlene B. Hirschfelder; Paulette Fairbanks Molin (2012). The Extraordinary Book of Native American Lists. Scarecrow. p. 34. ISBN 978-0-8108-7709-2.
  4. 1 2 Schulman, Susan, "Squaw Island to be renamed ‘Deyowenoguhdoh’" for The Buffalo News, January 16, 2015. Accessed Oct. 9, 2015
  5. King, C. Richard, "[http://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ787736 De/Scribing Squ*w: Indigenous Women and Imperial Idioms in the United States" in the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, v27 n2 p1-16 2003. Accessed Oct. 9, 2015
  6. Home and Farm Manual, 1884
  7. When Isaac Asimov needed a slur in Pebble in the Sky (1950) that science-fictional natives of other planets would use against natives of Earth, he looked to this term:
    Lieutenant Claudy… said harshly, "Your name, Earthie-squaw?"
    The term itself was richly insulting…
  8. Kick, Russ (1 March 2014). 100 Things You're Not Supposed to Know: Secrets, Conspiracies, Cover Ups, and Absurdities. Red Wheel Weiser. p. 140. ISBN 978-1-60925-947-1.
  9. Lakota, literally [he who] "takes the fat" or "greedy one".
  10. Goddard notes "the * means the word is unattested."
  11. Bright n.d.; Mihuesah, 2003.
  12. Callimachi, 2005.
  13. Montana Code 2-15-149
  14. Carrier, 2000.
  15. American Ornithologists' Union, 2000.
  16. Hagengruber, 2006.

References

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