When asked what Indians called North America before Columbus arrived, noted scholar Vine Deloria, Jr., simply replied, “Ours.”
What terms are most appropriate for talking about North America’s first people?
The word Indian comes from a mistake: on his first voyage to the Americas, Columbus thought the Caribbean was the Indian Ocean and the people there were Indians. The use of the word and assumptions around it are well documented in Columbus’s writings and those of other Spanish officials who accompanied him on the voyage and corresponded with him. Russell Means, Peter Matthiessen, George Carlin, and a few others have claimed that the word Indian is actually derived from the Spanish phrase una gente in Dios (people of God). But Columbus never used that phrase in reference to any people in the Americas.1 Use of the word Indian had nothing to do with the words in Dios. It was a mislabeling based on Columbus’s confusion about where he was when he first arrived in the Americas—and it stuck, even after the mistake was well known in Europe.
I use the word Indian in this book intentionally and with full knowledge of its shortcomings as a misnomer that gives some people offense. I have no fundamental opposition to what some label as “political correctness,” and in making decisions about labels, I try to use ones that are respectful but also clear. However, the terms native, indigenous, First Nations person, and aboriginal are often ambiguous, equally problematic, and in some cases more cumbersome. I also find Sherman Alexie’s remark resonant: “The white man tried to take our land, our sovereignty, and our languages. And he gave us the word ‘Indian.’ Now he wants to take the word ‘Indian’ away from us too. Well, he can’t have it.”2
As much as possible, we should all use tribal terms of self-reference in writing about each tribe: they are authentic and loaded with empowered meaning. Those words (such as Diné, Ho-Chunk, Dakota, Anishinaabe, or Ojibwe) work at the level of tribal discussion, but they sound ethnocentric to members of other tribes. Regardless of all decisions about labels, however, it is most critically important that we respect one another and create an environment in which it is safe to ask any thoughtful question without fear. The only way to arrive at a deeper understanding is to make it acceptable to ask anything you wanted to know about Indians but were afraid to ask and get a meaningful answer rather than an angry admonition.
What terms are not appropriate for talking about North America’s first people?
It’s important that fear of sounding ignorant or racist does not paralyze communication about Indians. Knowing what terms to use can help ease that fear, but knowing what terms to avoid can be just as important. Most native people frown on use of the words squaw, brave, and papoose. These are words that create distance, use hurtful clichés to point out difference, and say clearly that “those people” are not like normal people.
Squaw is considered particularly offensive. The true origins of the word are a subject of some debate. Some Indian activists and even scholars have asserted that it is actually a corruption of a Mohawk word for female genitalia, although that theory has been largely debunked by linguist Ives Goddard and others.3 Others assert that it is derived from the Cree word for woman, iskwe, or its Ojibwe variant, ikwe. Considering its first use by the French, the latter seems more likely. The words in Massachusett and other Algonquian languages on the Atlantic seaboard are quite similar to Cree and may be the more likely origin of the word’s transfer to English. Regardless of origin, however, it has often been used as a negatively value-laden term, and most native people find it truly insulting. Most special terms for minority women have similar perceptions (Negress, Jewess). There is ongoing work to change many place names (Squaw Valley, Squaw Lake) into something less offensive, but those efforts are sometimes met with resistance.
What terms are most appropriate for talking about each tribe?
Each tribe has its own terms of self-reference. Finding the appropriate labels can be confusing because the tribal terms of self-reference are not necessarily those employed by the U.S. or Canadian governments. Sometimes they are not even the same as the terms used by tribal governments.
The Ojibwe are a perfect example of this. The word Chippewa, frequently used in reference to the Ojibwe, especially in the United States, is actually a corruption of Ojibwe. Europeans frequently missed subtleties of Ojibwe pronunciation, hardening sounds and omitting letters. The soft j was written down as ch, and the soft b was written as p. The o was not even written, and the e was written as a short a. There have been numerous alternative spellings. But the term Chippewa was incorporated into the bureaucratic mechanisms of the U.S. government and never changed. Even today, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (the agency that deals with Indians) uses Chippewa. Furthermore, the term was formally incorporated into the constitutions of all Ojibwe reservations in America because those documents were drafted by the U.S. government rather than by tribal people.
Tribal advocacy for the original term Ojibwe is slowly winning out now, however, as many reservations have officially incorporated it into their tribal names and constitutions, with several notable exceptions. Constitutional reform is cumbersome and contentious at any level of politics, and widely supported terminology change often gets sidelined by other more disputed issues like tribal enrollment. Ojibwe people today use the term Ojibwe as a tribally specific term for self-reference (Ojibwe only) but also use Anishinaabe to refer to all Indians—Ojibwe, Dakota, and others. The word Anishinaabe is used as commonly as Ojibwe by tribal members in everyday conversation, which has led to some confusion about their distinctions, but Ojibwe is tribally specific and Anishinaabe is inclusive of all tribes.
For most tribes, there is one tribal term of self-reference and one other term, either corrupted from the original or entirely foreign. Such is the case for the people the Spanish called Navajo but who call themselves Diné. Early European explorers named the tribal groups they saw, often ignoring the people’s own names for themselves. This happened for the Ho-Chunk, whom the Ojibwe called Wiinibiigoog, meaning “people of the muddy water,” which the French corrupted into Winnebago.
Dialect issues within a tribal group occasionally cause confusion as well. The word Sioux, derived from the Ojibwe term Naadowesiwag (a species of snake), was a code word for “enemy” and often frowned upon by Dakota tribal members. The people called Sioux are really comprised of three major language groupings—Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota—who formed an alliance known as the Oceti Sakowin (Seven Council Fires). The Lakota further diversified into seven more bands. But the Dakota are not the Lakota; calling them Oceti Sakowin still leaves outsiders unsure of which group is being discussed; and sometimes scholars and even tribal members use the term Sioux as an expedient way to speak about the entire grouping in spite of the issues with the term.
How do I know how to spell all these complicated terms?
In discussion of tribes, it is usually best to use the preferred spelling of their respective reservation tribal governments (Potawatomi, Menominee, Ottawa, Assiniboine, and Ho-Chunk, for example).4 Sometimes tribal government spellings do not reflect the preferred spellings of tribal members or accepted orthographies, but they are your safest bet.
What term is most appropriate — nation, band, tribe, or reservation?
Prior to the first European efforts to colonize Indians, none of these labels were used by Indians to describe themselves, and the peoples of the two continents saw the concepts very differently. There was diversity in North America. The Aztec Empire had massive cities and ten million citizens. Their society was highly structured and perhaps the closest thing to what Europeans recognized as a nation. But the majority of tribes were smaller and simply called themselves “the people.” In most of the Americas they lived in villages, and the village was the primary social and political unit in their lives. Even populous tribes like the Ojibwe, who occupied millions of acres of territory, did not function as a single political entity. Villages were autonomous. Today there are around two hundred Ojibwe villages (about two-thirds of them in Canada and one-third in the United States), but there were even more during the treaty period. And the Ojibwe were one of five hundred Indian tribes in North America.
Colonial powers, especially the British and Americans, wanted to simplify the politics so they could get at Indian land faster. That process started with the construction of new labels for native communities that in turn helped the evolution of new Indian political structures. So instead of making hundreds of treaties with each and every Ojibwe village, the U.S. government summoned numerous chiefs from many villages in a given area to a treaty conference and called them the chiefs of a certain band. The concept of band was as new as the label to the Ojibwe, but once the political process began, the label and the concept stuck.
Even today, the tribal citizenship cards of most Ojibwe people in Minnesota note the band with which they are affiliated—Mississippi, Pillager, Lake Superior, or Pembina, for example. Tribal governments also had the term band incorporated into their constitutions, which were created by the U.S. government, so those political labels permeate the legalese of tribal government today. And often there are two to four bands represented on each reservation. The concept of band meant a lot at treaty time, and it sometimes plays heavily in land claims cases today, but the label and concept mean little else to Ojibwe people. Many other villages were grouped together under common bands at treaty time when that concept and label did not previously exist. The term is not offensive, but it can be confusing.
The word reservation was applied to the lands that were reserved or set aside for various groups of Indians at treaty time. A reservation is the place that many native people call home, and even those who live elsewhere associate strongly with their home reservations. These are the places where most cultural and community events are held and where tribes spend their resources trying to strengthen their communities and prepare for the future.
The word tribe gets used two ways: as a label for all people of the same shared cultural group (as for the Ojibwe in their two hundred distinct communities) and also as a label for each reservation’s government. Tribes, or tribal governments, are not just cultural enclaves. They are political entities, and complex laws impact and define the scope of their power. Tribes have power that supersedes that of state governments in many ways, making it possible for tribes to operate casinos, for example, without regard for state laws. A detailed explanation of tribal government, sovereignty, and law follows throughout this book, but the labels only make sense when one understands the concepts that inform them.
Tribes are in fact nations. They make laws, hold elections, administer funds, and interact with other governments. Because tribes are nations, tribal leaders and citizens often emphasize and reinforce their status by use of the word nation, and that term is preferred by some tribal people. The words nation, band, tribe, and reservation are sometimes used interchangeably, and none cause offense, but they all speak to the complicated history and evolving political landscape in Indian country.
What does the word powwow mean?
A Google search will reveal two full pages of definitions and conflicting answers to the linguistic origins of the word. The first usage of the term in English occurred in 1624. Most scholars agree that it is derived from a word in the languages of eastern Algonquian tribes (usually Narragansett or Massachusett) for spiritual leader. It was later misapplied to many types of ceremonial and secular events that involved dancing, and it has been spelled several different ways. See pages 68 to 78 for a substantive discussion of the history and cultural form of powwows today.
How can I find out the meaning of the place names around me that come from indigenous languages?
All languages are composed of roots, and those roots are loaded with meaning. In English, most roots come from the language’s Latin, Greek, Celtic, and Germanic underpinnings, usually unknown to everyday speakers of English. But for most first speakers of tribal languages, the roots of words and their deeper meanings are often known.
For example, the city of Bemidji, Minnesota, derives its name from an Ojibwe word, Bemijigamaag, meaning “the place where the current cuts across,” or “a river runs through it.” That word describes the unique geographical configuration of the place. Four major watersheds converge and form a continental divide in Bemidji. The Red River watershed flows west and north toward Winnipeg. The Rainy River watershed flows north through the Big Fork River into Rainy River. The Lake Superior watershed flows east. And the Mississippi watershed begins by flowing northwest, pulled toward the Red River watershed, and then north, toward the Rainy River watershed. It then flows east, toward the Lake Superior watershed, before charting its own course southward to the Gulf of Mexico. Bemidji is located on the northernmost point of the Mississippi River. Prior to construction of the power dam on the Mississippi, Lake Bemidji was actually two separate lakes, connected by a shallow stretch of water off of Diamond Point. The Mississippi River did not flow through those two lakes; it simply cut across the corner of the largest one—a very uncommon geographical situation. But the indigenous population that lived in Bemidji had a deep understanding of its geography, of the watersheds pulling at the water from that place, and that understanding is reflected in the name they chose.
Most indigenous place names have similar deep meanings. It was very uncommon for a lake or village to be named after a person or another place, as in European naming and mapping conventions. When Europeans developed maps of the Americas, they often tried to use indigenous names for various locales. However, the complexity of the terminology led to many distortions in the record. To find the deeper meaning of the Indian names for the places in which you live, it is often necessary to do a little research. Fortunately, some great books, like Virgil Vogel’s Indian Names in Michigan and Warren Upham’s Minnesota Place Names, have done a lot of groundwork to help you understand places in the Great Lakes region. Also, the writings of early explorers such as Henry Schoolcraft and Frederic Baraga contain a wealth of information. There are similar books for other parts of the country—ask your local librarian for advice.