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Hiram Hover: What's So Bad About Being Called a Redskin?

The Washington Post carries a report today about the research of Smithsonian Institution linguist Ives Goddard, who offers a revisionist history of the origins and initial meaning of the term “redskin.”

Goddard wants to argue that the term originated with native Americans—not European settlers—and that even when it later entered the English vernacular, it did so as a term of respect, and not a pejorative.  You can read Goddard's article here; here is how the Post summarizes it:

Smithsonian Institution senior linguist Ives Goddard spent seven months researching its history and concluded that "redskin" was first used by Native Americans in the 18th century to distinguish themselves from the white "other" encroaching on their lands and culture.

When it first appeared as an English expression in the early 1800s, "it came in the most respectful context and at the highest level," Goddard said in an interview. "These are white people and Indians talking together, with the white people trying to ingratiate themselves."

It was not until July 22, 1815, that "red skin" first appeared in print, he found -- in a news story in the Missouri Gazette on talks between Midwestern Indian tribes and envoys sent by President James Madison to negotiate treaties after the War of 1812.

The present-day implications of this--which Goddard acknowledges at the beginning of his article--have to do with a long-running suit about the use of the name by Washington DC’s football team.

But putting aside those concerns--and Michelle Malkin has already latched onto them as proof that the "P.C. chieftains" are misguided--is this good history?

First, it’s worth noting that it’s extremely tricky to use documentary sources authored by colonists and Europeans to get at native Americans’ spoken uses of the term “redskin.” In what language were the initial statements made—in a native American or a European language? If the former, how did they get translated into the latter, and by whom? 

Some of Goddard's examples appear to come at three or four removes from the actual spoken uses of language, and there’s no reason to believe that, in a world before C-SPAN and rush transcripts, the people at every stage were seeking to provide a literal transcription and translation of what was spoken.   Some Europeans attempted greater linguistic precision, but the sections of Goddard's article that provide specific discussions of native languages and terminology are notably among its shortest.

Second, and probably more importantly, it’s a rather blindered approach to focus narrowly on the terms "red" and “redskin,” and not to acknowledge the wider context of demeaning representations of native Americans by Europeans—which often came combined with references to their skin color well before the 19th century.  

In 1779, for example, Henry Dwight referred to native Americans as “copper Colour’d Vermine”; a century before, Cotton Mather wrote of “Tawny Pagans, than which there are not worse Divels Incarnate upon Earth” and of a “swarthy Generation of Philistines here; the Indian Natives, I mean.”  (From Alden Vaughan, "From White Man to Redskin," AHR (1982) - JSTOR subscribers can find it  here).  Skin color, in short, mattered as early as the 17th century, and was bound up with all sorts of other cultural, social, and political markers.

Finally, of course, how the term originated proves nothing about its later usage--the Washington Redskins didn't acquire that name from linguists familiar with 17th and 18th century native languages.  Goddard acknowledges this point, but I'll give the last word to University of Connecticut historian  Nancy Shoemaker, who is quoted in the Washington Post article:  "[E]ven if the Indians were the first to use it, the origin has no relationship to later use. What happened at the beginning doesn't justify it today."

Read entire article at Hiram Hover Blog