The Record on Redskins

The headline is amusing: A Linguist's Alternative History of 'Redskin,' as if it were always settled history even in my lifetime that the word redskin had always been a pejorative. But never mind that. The story, by Guy Gugliotta, effectively rebuts an odd column on Sept. 17 by sports columnist Mike Wise, who repeated claims from activist Suzan Shown Harjo that the term is related to the blood-drenched scalping of Native Americans.

Gugliotta never refers to that column, but provides plenty of room to the Smithsonian Institution's Ives Goddard:

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."...

Harjo rejects the argument but, as Gugliotta points out, doesn't document her own claim. If the story has a weakness, it's that it doesn't make clear that Goddard's view that the term was not originally intended as an insult--and had nothing to do with blood-drenched skins--has been the consensus for a long time.  My Sept. 17 post on Wise's column found the following comment on a discussion board by the Post's Marc Fisher:

While I spoke to many people—Indians and non—who oppose the Redskins name, and I have quoted them at length in previous columns on the same issue, I did not do so in this most recent column because those viewpoints are rather thoroughly discredited. For example, there is no evidence backing up the claim that the name stems from the scalping of Indians. All six of the academics I consulted with said they have been unable to find any evidence to back that notion.

I also think it's a shame that more of Harjo's hard-core identity politics doesn't come through in today's story, though you get a taste for it. Gugliotta, today:

"I'm very familiar with white men who uphold the judicious speech of white men," Harjo said in a telephone interview. "Europeans were not using high-minded language. [To them] we were only human when it came to territory, land cessions and whose side you were on."

That's a teaser; I say let let Harjo be Harjo, as she is in this Sept. 14, 2004 column:

First, the Whiteman is no longer solely white or a man or a descendant of someone who killed our grandpas or stole our grandmas' lands.

Second, the craziness and greed of the Whiteman that made him hate us because he did bad things to us is now a disease that blankets much of the legal system and popular culture, and infects many who never met us, historically or today.

Third, a manifestation of this pathology is that the new whiteman (a.k.a., the Disease) must keep us in our place...

Still, it's good to see the Post give running room to a mainstream academic. This is a much better performance than Wise's, who gave no indication that Harjo's view is speculative at best--or that he knew it was.