malinche II

[Michael Mccafferty]

Thank you, Dr. Kartunnen, for your, as usual, informative note. We are
certainly fortunate to have you as a contributor to this listserv.

Michael McCafferty

On Sat, 5 Feb 2000, Frances Karttunen wrote:

> About the use of the word "Indian"
>
>
> This is a problem some of my colleagues and I have struggled with most
> recently in the title and text of a volume of which I am co-editor.  The
> volume title is "Issues of Minority Peoples," and one of the contributions
> is an essay about names people have for other people.  Another contribution
> to the volume uses "Indian" and yet another that was submitted used "native"
> and "white man."  We editors an the contributors had debates and
> disagreements.
>
> In my own work, if I am talking about one particular people or several such
> groups, I use their own current chosen ethnic names.  That means preferring
> Tohono O'odom to Papago, Dakota/Lakota to Sioux, Wampanoag to Pokanet,
> Mexicano to Nahua, Purepecha to Tarascan, etc. unless there is a good reason
> to use the other name.  When the topic is very large, then one has to choose
> among "first peoples," "first nations," "Native Americans," "Alaska
> Natives," "indigenous peoples of the Americas," or (yes) "Indian people."
> There really are a lot of people today who think of themselves as, refer to
> themselves as, and want to be called "Indian people."  It depends on where
> you are and who you are talking about.
>
> When one is talking about the past, there are additional considerations.  If
> one's sources constantly talk about "Indians," then one is not doing one's
> readers a favor to pretend the sources don't say that, which goes for
> "whites" and "blacks" as well. (My strategy is to refuse to capitalize such
> labels.)  What's more, there is regional variation.  Mesoamericans, whether
> Nahua, Maya, Mixtec,or Popoluca (all names that one can argue are artificial
> or flawed), haven't ever, so far as my experience goes, referred to
> themselves as "indios."  On the other hand, the ancestors of the Wampanoags
> of the northeast Atlantic coast didn't call themselves Wampanoags in their
> written documents of the 1600s and 1700s. ("Wampanoag" seems to be a word
> borrowed by English and Dutch speakers from the Delaware language, and its
> original meaning was "people who live to the east of us.")  Guess what the
> ancestors of today's Wampanoags called themselves when writing about
> themselves in their own language?  They referred to themselves as
> "indiansog."  No kidding.  But if one goes back a few years to 1643, one
> finds Roger Williams reporting that the Narragansetts asked him why the
> English called them Indians.
>
> As for the title of Indian Women of Early Mexico, a number of alternative
> titles were considered, and the U. Of Oklahoma Press marketing department
> convinced the editors that this was the title that would most effectively
> inform potential readers of what the book is about.  The women in the book
> are from several different Mesoamerican peoples.  Naturally there was also
> much prepublication debate about what "Early Mexico" really means.
>
> Fran Karttunen