Xwa! XawElh ma munk nawitka ukuk! ("squaw") (fwd)

[Alan H. Hartley]

Liland Brajant ROS' wrote:

> Dave skribis:
> >YEkwa, na tEmtEm /skwa/ dret khakwa "shawash lhuchmEn"!  Ukuk chaku khapa
> >BastEn Wawa, wekna?
>
> *Almost* certainly -- certainly *probably* -- I would think, but not 100%
> necessarily. After all, "squaw" is of Algonquian origin, and there were
> Algonquian speakers (e.g. Blackfeet, Cree) resident not all that far from
> Kamloops. So it *could conceivably* have come directly from one of these
> other shawash wawa, with bastEn wawa's mediation. I think I recall that in
> Plains Cree "woman" is "iskwew"; "girl" would be "iskwesis", I think.

Eng. SQUAW definitely comes (in 17c.) from an Eastern Algonquian (prob.
Massachusett) word for 'woman'.

> PS: Are you sure about the "shawash lhuchmEn" gloss, as opposed to its being
> a simple synonym of "lhuchmEn"? In bastEn wawa "squaw" certainly carries the
> presumption of Indianness, but I don't think this is true in Algonquian, and
> am not sure from the citation whether such an implication is present in the
> CJ.

The Algonquian words all mean 'woman', but it is possible that some of the
negative force of the word had its origins in native usage:

"the greatest insult to an Indian is to say to him "Go, you are a squaw (a
woman.)"

(1828 J. C. Beltami _Pilgrimage in Europe & Amer._ II. 146; the ref. here is to
either the Dakota or the Ojibway, probably the latter)

So it may be that at least a part of the disparaging character of the English
word now considered so offensive by many Native Americans has its ultimate
source, not in Euro-American attitudes, but in those of some Native American men
toward women.

Alan