What's in a name?
Bullfrog
Shipmate
in Epiphanies
I got some friends, old and distant now, who are Native American. And I know from conversation that they're sensitive about words like "Indian." "Indian" is also confusing to me because I live in a neighborhood that contains a lot of people who are actually from India. And they are also Indian, though I wouldn't generally think to call people Indians. *
And then there's this road in my neighborhood, if you look at old maps it used to be called "Indian Boundary Road," because it marks the exact line where the northern edge of Chicago used to be, and where the land granted to the Pottawatomie Tribe used to end. That was, of course, before they were exiled from the region and forced out west, a nasty business to be sure. If you draw a straight line, you will find a local landmark called "Indian Boundary Park" and have a rough area of my general geographical locale. It's a lovely park. They kept the name for the park, but the road is now called Rogers Avenue. I guess someone got embarrassed. But the history is worth keeping and I think there's something lost in renaming the road after a white guy of local historical importance.
The preferred word, I'm told by these friends of mine, is "Native American." It's more respectful. They're not from India. They are not Indians. I've been in the habit of using the expression "Native" when referring to the culture. For peak courtesy, refer to the actual tribe, such as "Navajo" or "S'klallam" or "Pottawatomie."
Now, I do have some friends, some who are here, who get sensitive about this rule because they do know Native folks (my word) who are fine with the word "Indian," or they know local reservations or tribes who use that word and honestly? I don't much mind. I use "Native" because the folks I know personally are touchy and I tend to err on the side of politeness when I'm dealing with other people's cultures. But I'm not inclined to declare myself the white defender of other people's cultures. I just try to do what I think is right and be respectful.
What's the morality here? What's the ethical framework? Is there one?
I'm sure we can find different opinions among Native voices on this one. If you want a source, I think this one sets up my sense of the conversation very nicely.
And here's a white guy who I think did a classy thing. I respect him a lot and think he's a fine musician, not claiming it's "own voice." But he makes a good case study.
Feel free to add your own.
* Tangentially, I do think there's something pernicious about referring to a person as an identity. I guess I'm a Christian, but it's a little weird if you treat me like that's my ontology, especially if you're a stranger. I'm not keen on being an American these days. Per jokes, I'll take "hick," sometimes, but only in jest.**
** "White man of Appalachian extraction" would be far more politically correct, and please pardon me while I extract my tongue from my cheek. That's a joke. Are you not entertained?
And then there's this road in my neighborhood, if you look at old maps it used to be called "Indian Boundary Road," because it marks the exact line where the northern edge of Chicago used to be, and where the land granted to the Pottawatomie Tribe used to end. That was, of course, before they were exiled from the region and forced out west, a nasty business to be sure. If you draw a straight line, you will find a local landmark called "Indian Boundary Park" and have a rough area of my general geographical locale. It's a lovely park. They kept the name for the park, but the road is now called Rogers Avenue. I guess someone got embarrassed. But the history is worth keeping and I think there's something lost in renaming the road after a white guy of local historical importance.
The preferred word, I'm told by these friends of mine, is "Native American." It's more respectful. They're not from India. They are not Indians. I've been in the habit of using the expression "Native" when referring to the culture. For peak courtesy, refer to the actual tribe, such as "Navajo" or "S'klallam" or "Pottawatomie."
Now, I do have some friends, some who are here, who get sensitive about this rule because they do know Native folks (my word) who are fine with the word "Indian," or they know local reservations or tribes who use that word and honestly? I don't much mind. I use "Native" because the folks I know personally are touchy and I tend to err on the side of politeness when I'm dealing with other people's cultures. But I'm not inclined to declare myself the white defender of other people's cultures. I just try to do what I think is right and be respectful.
What's the morality here? What's the ethical framework? Is there one?
I'm sure we can find different opinions among Native voices on this one. If you want a source, I think this one sets up my sense of the conversation very nicely.
And here's a white guy who I think did a classy thing. I respect him a lot and think he's a fine musician, not claiming it's "own voice." But he makes a good case study.
Feel free to add your own.
* Tangentially, I do think there's something pernicious about referring to a person as an identity. I guess I'm a Christian, but it's a little weird if you treat me like that's my ontology, especially if you're a stranger. I'm not keen on being an American these days. Per jokes, I'll take "hick," sometimes, but only in jest.**
** "White man of Appalachian extraction" would be far more politically correct, and please pardon me while I extract my tongue from my cheek. That's a joke. Are you not entertained?
Comments
Are you saying that the people groups you mentioned - Navajo, S'klallam and Pottawatomie - are identities, and that referring to individuals using these names is somehow highly damaging and destructive or deadly? It seems unlikely, but I can't currently see how to read the words.
Names are about identity and names are about belonging. How do you know which group of people you belong to if you don't have a name for them?
This community goes by the name of Ship of Fools. Would the same group of people, going by a different name, be the same community?
I took that paragraph as being about identity-as-noun vs identity-as-adjective. The difference between a Scot and a Scottish person. I think it's a tricky one and lands pretty differently depending on the identity and the term used. Using "native" as a noun has, to my white British ears, colonial connotations of "the natives are restless" kind, but I suspect it might be rather different in Sioux or Navajo usage. I think identity-as-noun becomes a problem when it's used by non-members of the group to "other" the group.
I think an outsider should use the term that members of X group generally agree upon, and if in doubt ask what term is preferred. If you're talking to a specific member of X group that prefers a different term to be used to refer to them, use that term to refer to them - it doesn't mean that you need to use that term when speaking generally. I don't think it's actually that complicated.
I think taking the lead from members of the group in question is always the way to go. The name of a major city centre road where I live refers to the fact that the medieval Jewish community lived there - it doesn't use a slur, but it's still an uncomfortable sort of phrasing from a modern point of view. The local Jewish community very explicitly want the name to remain as a commemoration of their local history, so I've chosen to no longer feel uncomfortable about it because I don't think it's my place to feel uncomfortable in this instance.
Our racists look at Australia and see how groups (entirely legitimately, in many ways) associate themselves with terms like Indigenous and Native and ask why we don't use that language here for white people. There's also a whole racist background to much of our Western scientific language, including words like Native and Indigenous, which doesn't reflect our reality.
For me that's a problem. Having been to Australia and New Zealand recently I've been trying to listen hard to these kinds of words, and to be honest I think they are so problematic that I would rather they were not used anywhere. It isn't up to me, and these cultural groups are not responsible for racists elsewhere in the world and the whole scientific history of eugenics. Indeed they are very largely the victims of it.
Pardon me if I'm hard to understand, I'm still trying to puzzle out why I'm hard to understand, but I think that this might be a pond thing. And no disrespect to my colleagues across the Atlantic if it is. Labeling like this is about racism and classism and you have to be on the inside of a minority culture to really understand it in a certain sense.
OK, I'm gonna tell a long story from my spouse's family (hi @Gwai ) and see if that gets the point across by analogy. Like I do. Hold on to your hats...
So, my grandma-in-law, Patricia Wood, is from England. She ... emigrated ... to the US at an early age after growing up in the blitz. Her maiden name was Bolam. And she grew up in Yorkshire. Her life involved some truly wild tales, but one that I was told, and weirdly relate to from my own life, was that she was beaten at school for using the accent she spoke with at home, and was beaten at home for using the accent she spoke with at school.
Why the hell would they do that? Well...so I'm told, this was because she was from Yorkshire, which (pardon the expression) was kind of the hillbilly part of England. Yorkshire had a low class accent, not "proper English."
Now, obviously if you're from a "high class" culture, you understand that you're not supposed to sound ignorant, low class, etc.* But if you're from certain low class cultures, you also understand that you don't want to turn into a snob, an elitist. I suspect the school was trying to turn her into a "proper British woman" and her family was trying to make sure she was still a member of her family. There's a feeling of losing someone when your culture and identity, your accent gets erased like that by a school system that says you have to talk a certain way to sound appropriately "civilized."
Funny thing, when I met her later in life, she always sounded posh. And I met her mother once as a frail, tough-as-nails old woman** who certainly spoke with a different variation of "British accent." And I learned that in life, Patricia's mother Betty was always teasing her for her "posh" accent.
* Like a hick. If you want to know what the word "hick" means, I think I've found the meaning right here in this moment. "Hick" is an American pejorative but I think it translates across cultures rather nicely. It's a simple thing.
** Appalachians do know this type. Game respects game, as they say.
So, by now you're wondering WTF this has to do with the labels that white people apply to Native Americans. Does the word "genocide" mean anything to you? That's what white people did to Native Americans, I figure most of us are historically literate enough to understand that. Most of them live on reservations with boundaries established by the American government, defined by the basically-white American culture. And I do know one guy who went through a "re-education" experience where they tried to "educate" his culture out of him. Thankfully, it didn't take, and to my amazement he's actually a preacher. Don't ask me how, I don't know. He also retains his culture (Navajo,) language, braids, whole nine yards. I am honored by his acquaintance.
But nobody, to my knowledge, has ever persecuted ship of fools. Nobody has ever tried to wipe us off the internet. There's some trauma running around here, don't get me wrong, but nothing on that scale. One nice thing about the internet is that the worst thing you have to deal with is digital exile. Nobody actually dies.
And it's not a big enough place that people aren't inventing stupid ugly nicknames for us like "shitties." We don't have to deal with that. If anyone did, you'd know what it's like viscerally and I think we'd suddenly get an earful of why there's a prickly conversation around phrases like "Indian," "Indigenous," or "Native American."
[Folks who are very perceptive may notice in the footnotes I could also make commentary on my own culture, but people keep complaining when I do that, so I'm trying to get off that hobby horse.]
I think from the American perspective, these are fraught terms because they were weaponized. And there are some people who have forgotten that they were weaponized, and there are some people who have not forgotten.
And the problem becomes the remembrance.
It's a curious thing. England has a longer history. Some historical injuries don't set right and after a while...what do you do about that? Do you keep trying to straighten them? Or do you just say "Eh, that's good enough!" and move on?
A lot depends on how you relate to the injury, I think.
And probably some folks would say the terms are still being weaponized. Maybe I am, even.
...
Oh yeah, there's another word that's considered so insulting it didn't make the list. We have some of those too. It used to be a national football team's mascot until they ditched it not too long ago, one that played in Washington, DC of all places!
In England it's at least as much about class than it is about region. Yorkshire accents aren't uniquely "hillbilly". England privileges the middle class accents of London and the South East. In the past it would have been RP that was privileged in this way but that has shifted over time. Anything outside these would be lower status, whether it is west country, scouse, brummie, geordie or Norfolk. Northern and working class accents tend to diverge more from "standard" but allowing any "regional accents" on the BBC was a huge change. I grew up in Somerset with a Bristolian father who had lost any trace of Brizzle via independent school followed by Oxford and Cambridge and I inherited his "generic southern middle class" accent. At school, however, this was considered "posh" by my peers so I subconsciously code switched to something closer to the local mean.
Thank you for clarifying all of that! I've picked up some understanding of this from my spouse, but my knowledge of the specific cultural ins and outs of England is very dim. And I'm sure I'm unconsciously making analogies to my own growing up in north-central Appalachia.
And that gets back to the big point about internal versus external identity and who gets the right to define.
I'm pretty sure you don't want me telling you what Yorkshire is like. I don't think I have any ancestral feuds with Yorkshire. I mean, my grandpa Wilson's ancestors were vaguely from the border regions, but I don't know as many specifics because the latest one off the boat that I know of was mid-19th century.
It'd be easier and harder to work out if I had a less tenuous relationship with Yorkshire, either affectionate or hostile. I think persecution makes these conversations a lot more fraught, as @Basketactortale put it. Excellent word.
My references began to change when I lived on an open reservation in South Dakota and began to pick up a little of the Lakota language.
Now I live in Eastern Washington, in an area once occupied by the Paulas, near the Ninimupuu lands.
I seldom use the "I" noun anymore now but still catch myself every once in a while. If I know the native name for the nation/tribe I will incorporate it. If I do not, I look it up.
I admit I am not perfect at this. I call it a work in progress, though.
A program I find very helpful in this growth is called. Unreserved, a First Nations radio show put out by the CBC. It provides insights from both sides of the border.
I think that's the point, refuse to stay in the past, grow into the future, and understand it will continue to be a work in progress
The specific sentence about which I'm looking for clarification is the first one I quoted: What do you mean by "referring to a person as an identity"? Why do you use the word "pernicious"?
By "identity", do you mean words like "Navajo" or "S'klallam" or "Pottawatomie"?
Are you, in your posts, using the word "identity" to refer both to the deprecating words that people use for other people groups, and also to the non-deprecating words that people groups use for themselves?
There are a lot of words like this. There are discriminatory epithets that have been "reclaimed" by the groups they refer to, there are words that are very hurtful, there are words that are OK for group members to use, but not for outsiders to use to refer to the group, and so on.
So I start with "call people what they want to be called". That's a pretty decent general rule, as long as whatever you want to be called isn't itself offensive or otherwise ridiculous. If we're talking about a group of people, then pick the word that is most popular or least objected to amongst members of the group.
Identity-as-noun vs identity-as-adjective is an interesting topic. A few years ago, we had some local equal opportunities "expert" give a talk at work, in which she was asserting that person-first language was the only inoffensive option, and probably every autistic person in the room stood up and told her she was wrong.
For me, the key is not so much person-first vs identity-first, or noun vs adjective, as whether you understand that members of a particular identity group are individuals, and the fact that they share that identity doesn't necessarily mean that they share other things. If you can understand that you are not the same as other people from your social / cultural background, you should be able to understand that people from a background that differs from yours are also not the same as each other.
Well no, from a British perspective our racists are overwhelmingly not indigenous if we go back to their origins - because most white British people are from Saxon or Norman heritage, ie from invasive forces. But also, Indigenous as a noun with a capital i is not the same as indigenous as an adjective with a lowercase i. Indigenous as a noun has specific parameters which British racists don't meet.
It's frankly not your place to decide that terms used by Indigenous people to describe themselves are problematic.