Redskin
The term redskin underwent pejoration through the 19th to early 20th centuries[1] and in contemporary dictionaries of American English, it is labeled as offensive, disparaging, or insulting.
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.
By midcentury, remarks about skin color and the categorization of peoples by simple color-coded labels (red, white, black) had become commonplace.
"[2] 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.
[3][4]: 627–28 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,[4]: 634 the general use of the term was in response to meeting people who called themselves white and their slaves black.
[6] Early ethnographic writers used a variety of terms; olivastre (olive) by François Bernier (1684),[7] rufus (reddish, ruddy) by Linnaeus (1758),[8] kupferroth ("copper-red") by Blumenbach (1779),[9] and eventually simply "red" by René Lesson (1847).
[10] Early explorers and later Anglo-Americans termed Native Americans "light-skinned", "brown", "tawny", or "russet", but not "red" prior to the 19th century.
"[15] 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.
[18] 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.
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 ..."[20] 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 ca[l]mly what I shall say.
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.
[24] 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.
"[27] 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.
[29] 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.
[30][31] While this claim is associated in the media with litigants in the Washington Redskins trademark dispute; Amanda Blackhorse[32] and Suzan Shown Harjo,[33] the National Congress of American Indians' support indicates that the belief is widespread.
[19]: 1 [34] 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".
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.
[38] 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.
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.
[53] The principal of Red Mesa said in 2014 that use of the word outside American Indian communities should be avoided because it could perpetuate "the legacy of negativity that the term has created.
"[56] Numerous civil rights, educational, athletic, and academic organizations consider any use of native names/symbols by non-native sports teams to be a harmful form of ethnic stereotyping which should be eliminated.
[26][60][61] After decades of opposition to the name of the team by Native Americans, major sponsors responded to opponents of systemic racism in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.
[83] The linguistic expert for the petitioners, Geoffrey Nunberg, argued that whatever its origins, redskins was a slur at the time of the trademark registrations, based upon the 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.
The school board for Cuyahoga Heights Ohio voted unanimously to retire their mascot following the decision by the Cleveland Indians to become the Guardians.
