Redskin
Redskin is a slang term for Native Americans in the United States and First Nations in Canada. The term redskin underwent pejoration through the 19th to early 20th centuries and in contemporary dictionaries of American English, it is labeled as offensive, disparaging, or insulting. Although the term has almost disappeared from contemporary use, it remains in use as a sports team name. The most prominent was the NFL's Washington Redskins, who resisted decades of opposition before retiring the name in 2020 following renewed attention to racial justice in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and subsequent protests. While the usage by other teams has been declining steadily, 37 high schools in the United States continue to use the Redskins name. School administrators and alumni assert that their use of the name is honoring their local tradition and not insulting to Native Americans.
The origin of the choice of red to describe Native Americans in English is debated. While related terms were used in anthropological literature as early as the 17th century, labels based on skin color entered everyday speech around the middle of the 18th century. "At the start of the eighteenth century, Indians and Europeans rarely mentioned the color of each other's skins. By midcentury, remarks about skin color and the categorization of peoples by simple color-coded labels had become commonplace."
Red as a racial identifier
Documents from the colonial period indicate that the use of red as an identifier by Native Americans for themselves emerged in the context of Indian-European diplomacy in the southeastern region of North America, becoming common usage in the 1720s. Subsequently, variations of "red men" were adopted by Europeans, becoming a generic label for all Native Americans.Linguistic evidence indicates that, while some tribes may have used red to refer to themselves during the pre-Columbian era based upon their origin stories, the general use of the term was in response to meeting people who called themselves white and their slaves black. The choice of red rather than other colors may have been due to cultural associations, rather than skin color. Red and white were a dichotomy that had pervasive symbolic meanings in southeastern Native cultures which was less prevalent among northern tribes. While there was occasional use of red in Native American-European diplomacy in the northeast, it was still rare there even after it had become common in the southeast. Instead, Indian was translated into the native languages there as "men", "real people", or "original people". Usage in the northeast region by Europeans may have been largely limited to descriptions of tribes such as the Beothuk of Newfoundland, whose practice of painting their bodies and possessions with red ochre led Europeans to refer to them as "Red Indians". The personification of the Americas was staged at Whitehall Palace in December 1613 by a dancer in The Somerset Masque wearing "a skin coat the colour of the juice of mulberries, on her head large round brims of many coloured feathers, and in the midst of it a small crown".
Early ethnographic writers used a variety of terms; olivastre by François Bernier, rufus by Linnaeus, kupferroth by Blumenbach, and eventually simply "red" by René Lesson. Early explorers and later Anglo-Americans termed Native Americans "light-skinned", "brown", "tawny", or "russet", but not "red" prior to the 19th century. Many did not view Natives as distinctly different in color from themselves, and thus could be assimilated into colonial society, beginning with conversion to Christianity.
In the modern debate over sports teams with the name, Oklahoma News 4 asserted that Oklahoma should change its name. The name Oklahoma translates from Choctaw as 'red people'. However, humma has a number of possible meanings in Choctaw, one of which is "humma, an addition to a man's name which gives him some distinction, calling on him for courage and honor." The name Oklahoma was created in 1866 by Principal Chief Allen Wright. The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma states that in the Choctaw language Okla means "people" and humma means "red."
Origins of redskin in English
The first combination of red with skin, to form the term redskin, is dated to 1769 by Ives Goddard, linguist and curator emeritus in the Department of Anthropology of the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution. Goddard begins by pointing out that what had previously been considered the earliest English use of the term, a letter purported to have been written to an Englishman living in Hadley, Massachusetts in 1699, was spurious.Goddard's alternative etymology is that the term emerged from the speech of Native Americans themselves, and that the origin and use of the term in the late 18th and early 19th century was benign. When it first appeared "it came in the most respectful context and at the highest level.... These are white people and Indians talking together, with the white people trying to ingratiate themselves". The word later underwent a process of pejoration, by which it gained a negative connotation. Goddard suggests that redskin emerged from French translations of Native American speech in Illinois and Missouri territories in the 18th century. He cites as the earliest example a 1769 set of "talks", or letters, from chiefs of the Piankeshaw to Col. John Wilkins an English officer at Fort de Chartres. One letter included "si quelques peaux Rouges", which was translated as 'if any redskins', and the second included "tout les peaux rouges", which was translated as 'all the redskins'. The term here refers to warriors specifically. The term redskin enters wider English usage only in the first half of the 19th century. However, in an interview, Goddard admitted that it is impossible to verify whether the French translations of the Miami-Illinois language were accurate.
The term was used in an August 22, 1812, meeting between President James Madison and a delegation of chiefs from western tribes. There, the response of Osage chief "No Ears" to Madison's speech included the statement, "I know the manners of the whites and the red skins," while French Crow, principal chief of the Wahpekute band of Santee Sioux, was recorded as having said, "I am a red-skin, but what I say is the truth, and notwithstanding I came a long way I am content, but wish to return from here." However, while these usages may have been earliest, they may not have been disseminated widely. While the 1812 meeting with President Madison was contemporaneously recorded, the records were not published until 2004.
The earliest known appearance of the term in print occurred in multiple periodicals in October 1813 quoting a letter dated August 27, 1813. It concerned an expedition during the War of 1812 led by General Benjamin Howard against Indians in the Illinois and Mississippi territories: "The expedition will be 40 days out, and there is no doubt but we shall have to contend with powerful hordes of red skins..."
Goddard suggests that a key usage was in a 20 July 1815 speech by Meskwaki Chief Black Thunder at the treaty council at Portage des Sioux, in which he is recorded as stating, "My Father – Restrain your feelings, and hear camly what I shall say. I shall tell it to you plainly, I shall not speak with fear and trembling. I feel no fear. I have no cause to fear. I have never injured you, and innocence can feel no fear. I turn to all, red skins and white skins, and challenge an accusation against me." This speech was published widely, and Goddard speculates that it reached James Fenimore Cooper. In Cooper's novels The Pioneers and The Last of the Mohicans, both Native American and white characters use the term. These novels were widely distributed, and can be credited with bringing the term to "universal notice". The first time the term appears in Bartlett's "Dictionary of Americanisms", Goddard notes, the illustrative reference is to Last of the Mohicans.
Johnathan Buffalo, historic preservation director of the Meskwaki, said that in the 1800s redskins was used by the tribe for self-identification. Similarly, they identified others as "whiteskins" or "blackskins". Goddard's evidence for indigenous usage includes a 1914 phonetic transcription of the Meskwaki language in which both eesaawinameshkaata 'one with brown skin' and meeshkwinameshkaata 'one with red skin' were used to refer to Indians, while waapeshkinameshkaanichini 'one with white skin, white person' was used to refer to Europeans. However, the pre-contact Meskwaki use of red in identifying themselves did not refer to skin color, but to their origin stories as the "red-earth" people.
Historian Darren Reid of Coventry University states it is difficult for historians to document anything with certainty since Native Americans, as a non-literate society, did not produce the written sources upon which historians rely. Instead, what is cited as Native American usage was generally attributed to them by European writers. Any use of red in its various forms, including redskin, by Native Americans to refer to themselves reflected their need to use the language of the times in order to be understood by Europeans.
Sociologist James V. Fenelon makes a more explicit statement that Goddard's article is poor scholarship, given that the conclusion of the origin and usage by Natives as "entirely benign" is divorced from the socio-historical realities of hostility and racism from which it emerged.
Pejoration
The pejoration of the term redskin arguably begins as soon as its introduction in the early 19th century. A linguistic analysis of 42 books published between 1875 and 1930 found that negative contexts for the use of redskin were significantly more frequent than positive ones. However, the use of the word "Indian" in a similarly selected set of books was nearly the same, with more frequent negative than positive contexts, indicating that it was not the term "redskin" that was loaded pejoratively, but that its usage represents a generally negative attitude towards its referent. The word was first listed in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary in 1898 as "often contemptuous."Sociologist Irving Lewis Allen suggests that slang identifiers for ethnic groups based upon physical characteristics, including redskin, are by nature derogatory, emphasizing the difference between the speaker and the target. However, Luvell Anderson of the University of Memphis, in his paper "Slurring Words", argues that for a word to be a slur, the word must communicate ideas beyond identifying a target group, and that slurs are offensive because the additional data contained in those words differentiates those individuals from otherwise accepted groups.
Some Native American activists in the 21st century, in contradiction of the etymological evidence discussed above, assert that redskin refers directly to the bloody, red scalp or other body part collected for bounty. While this claim is associated in the media with litigants in the Washington Redskins trademark dispute; Amanda Blackhorse and Suzan Shown Harjo, the National Congress of American Indians' support indicates that the belief is widespread. Goddard denies any direct connection to scalping, and says there is a lack of evidence for the claim. C. Richard King argues that the lack of direct evidence for the assertion does not mean that those making the claim are "wrong to draw an association between a term that empathizes an identity based upon skin color and a history that commodified Native American body parts".
The term red-skin was, in fact used in conjunction with scalp hunting in the 19th century. In 1863 a Winona, Minnesota, newspaper, the Daily Republican, printed an announcement: "The state reward for dead Indians has been increased to $200 for every red-skin sent to Purgatory. This sum is more than the dead bodies of all the Indians east of the Red River are worth." A news story published by the Atchison Daily Champion in Atchison, Kansas, on October 9, 1885, tells of the settlers' "hunt for redskins, with a view of obtaining their scalps", worth $250. In his early career as the owner of a newspaper in South Dakota, L. Frank Baum wrote an editorial upon the death of Chief Sitting Bull in which he advocates the annihilation of all remaining redskins in order to secure the safety of white settlers, and because "better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are."
When Hollywood westerns were most popular, roughly 1920–1970, the term redskins was often used to refer to Native Americans when war was imminent or in progress. In the Washington Redskins trademark dispute, the main issue was the meaning of the term in the period when the trademark registrations were issued, 1967–1990. The linguistic expert for the petitioner, Geoffrey Nunberg, successfully argued that whatever its origins, redskins was a slur at that time based upon passages from books and newspapers and movie clips, in which the word is inevitably associated with contempt, derision, condescension, or sentimental paeans to the noble savage. John McWhorter, an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University, had compared the evolution of the name into a slur to that of other racial terms such as Oriental which also acquired implied meanings associated with contempt.