How did Native Americans refer to themselves in the 19th century?
score:54
I'll answer with the aid of Osage, since that's the language I know (my father's people are Osage) and have good resources for. Osage is a Western Siouxan language, closely related to the Lakota spoken by the "Sioux" from your story1. So while this isn't the answer for them, it should at least give you the right idea.
The other big advantage to using Osage here is that we have a dictionary for it written by an actual Native Anthropologist, Francis La Flesche, around the turn of the 20th Century, not that far from the period you are asking about. He was born among the Omaha in the decade before your story. Omaha is also a Siouxan language, very closely related to the Osage language.
Since English wasn't their native language, one would imagine when asking such a thing in English, indigenous peoples would use the appropriate English words, which in this case would be "Indian".
In their own languages, they'd likely use their own endonym for themselves, often translating into something like "the people". For my father's people, it was ππ°ππ°ππ· (Wa-zha'-zhe, simplified by the French to "Osage"). I've seen it translated as "People of the middle waters", but La Flesche writing in the early 20th century said the exact meaning had been lost. For the people who Kelley called "Sioux", their endonym is "Lakota" (which I will hereafter use, as per their wishes).
As for exonyms, the Osage use πππΉπ°ππΌπ° (xin-ha' Γ§ka) for people of European descent. Its a compound word meaning "white skin"3. According to La Flesche, for (American) Indians in general the Osage word was and is ππ»πΌπ° ππππ· (Ne-ka zhu-dse). This is a compound word of "red man". However, La Flesche reported that they had as an antonym to πππΉπ°ππΌπ° the word πππΉπ°πππ°ππ· (xin-ha' sha-be. "dark skin"). This word/term is not in their modern dictionary.4
The Lakota dictionary I have access to online isn't as useful, but I see their word for "White" is indeed quite similar to Osage's (Transliterated "ska" instead of Γ§ka). So it would probably be quite similar.
So yes, it does look like they had words for both Native Americans as a whole, and for non-white people. However, they were compound words (word-ized phrases), possibly showing their relatively novel nature to their traditional way of thinking.
1 - "Sioux" was apparently an exonym from an enemy tribe, meaning something like "yellow snake". They call themselves "Lakota", so that's generally the preferred way to refer to that people today.
2 - The modern Osage writing system I used here (occasionally anachronistically) is a proper alphabet, mostly using consonant-vowel couplets for each syllable. You can find a pronunciation key on the linked Wikipedia page above, or as a sidebar on the modern Osage dictionary produced by the Osage Nation.
3 - There were also of course some less charitable names, like "yellow eye"
4- As someone well-acquiainted with the intervening era of American History, I can come up with some guesses as to why that term didn't make the modern dictionary. However, a lot of them aren't complementary, so it wouldn't be right to speculate without looking into it. To be fair, it barely made La Fleshe's dictionary, as an alternate form rather than its own entry.
Upvote:9
Nancy Shoemaker wrote an article that covers some of the history of this,ΒΉ and says there were patterns for the languages in different regions in the 1700s:
From the St. Lawrence to the Upper Mississippi, the word βIndian,β when interpreted into native languages, usually came to be equated with the word for βpeople,β sometimes translated as βmen,β βreal people,β or βoriginal people.β The contemporary French historian Baqueville de la Potherie observed this pattern in the Great Lakes region when he wrote of an Indian telling the the fur trader Perrot βthat when βthe menβ arrived they would render him thanks; it is thus that all savages are designated among themselves, while they call the French, βFrench,β and the [other] people from Europe by the names of their respective nations.β
In contrast, in southeastern Indian languages, the word or phrase meaning βIndianβ originates in the word for the color βred.β [...] At some point in the dialogue between Indians and Europeans, βIndianβ came to mean βred menβ or βred peopleβ in the native languages of southeastern Indians.
She gives as examples the Natchez word tvmh-pakup (man-red), Chocktaw and Chickasaw hatak apt homma (from hatak, man, and homma, red), and Muskogee estΔ-cΓ‘tΔ (man-red). (She also mentions that there were many exonyms for βEuropeansβ in the Northeast, such as Iroquois βhatchetmakers.β Also, the word βsavageβ in the historical quotation is probably a literal translation of French sauvages.)
She argues that the Natives of this region developed this self-identification in response to meeting other people who called themselves βwhiteβ and βblack,β and the English picked it up from them much later. Furthermore, settlers in the northeast were more likely to call themselves βChristianβ a term that could not be translated literally, than βWhite,β which could, whereas those in the southeast mainly referred to themselves by their skin color.
She also mentions other theories, including that some Southeastern peoples may have had origin stories for themselves involving red clay, or that it might have originated in the custom of using red paint to designate warriors. A particularly interesting one is her theory of how the Cherokee tradition of βwhiteβ elder civil chiefs and βredβ younger war chiefs informed their interpretation of the 1730 treaty between the Cherokee and the King of England. (p. 639)
ΒΉ Nancy Shoemaker, "How Indians got to be red," The American Historical Review, Vol. 102, No. 3, Jun. 1997, pp. 625-644
More post
- π What is the nature of questions that can be answered by historical sources and methods?
- π What was the first instance of native Americans using gunpowder weapons in battle and did they ever make their own powder?
- π When was the last book containing a table of logarithms was published?
- π The Needham Question: What stunted China's technological and proto-scientific advancement?
- π When was the concept of Europe as a singular political unit conceived?
- π Is Josephus a legitimate historical text?
- π Historically, what methods have irregular forces used to disable tanks?
- π Is there any resource to learn interiors of a house for particular classes in 17th Century in Bohemia?
- π When did subtractive notation become common for Roman numerals?
- π What is the title of a medieval mayor?
- π What does this quote from the Roman imperial poet Rutilius mean?
- π How much gold did America hold at the Nixon shock?
- π Other examples of Enclave created for protection of a Mixed Race
- π What did the British Empire mean by "Free Trade" in reference to the colonies?
- π Did the US's push to dissolve the imperial preference become an underlying reason for the collapse of the British empire
- π What was life like for Australian convicts in the last few decades of transportation?
- π After the split with Stalin, what was Yugoslavia's official attitude towards Soviet history before Stalin's takeover?
- π Are modern handguns a major reason for democratization?
- π Zoroastrianism and Hinduism
- π How did the Egyptian engineers of the Third and Fourth Dynasty construct the Pyramids and Sphinx without modern science and mathematics?
- π What were the insignia of the Western Roman Empire and what happened to them?
- π Anti-personnel use of blowguns
- π Why was the king of Judah referred to as "the king of the House-of-David"?
- π Did European elites train natives from colonial lands to help spread western values?
- π What do we know about the location of Islamic schools in pre-colonial Africa?
- π Why don't/can't the different ethnolinguistic groups of people in erstwhile Yugoslavia get along with each other?
- π Why are gliders not used anymore in military operation?
- π Were there early modern precursors to eugenics?
- π How would a Spartan have held his shield?
- π Ancient Greek term rendered incorrectly as numbers and Latin letters, "01KCDΓ". What is it?
Source: stackoverflow.com
Search Posts
Related post
- π How did Native Americans refer to themselves in the 19th century?
- π How did they measure speed in the 19th century so they could issue the first speeding ticket?
- π Where and how did scientists of the 18th and 19th century learn foreign languages?
- π How did 19th century European nations arbitrate the process of colonization among themselves?
- π Why did Europeans call Native Americans Indians in the 18th Century AD, After they had found out they were in the wrong continent?
- π How did the mortality of the Native Americans happen?
- π Why did Native Americans die from European diseases while Europeans didn't catch serious diseases from the New World?
- π Did Native Americans ever fight the indigenous people living in Mexico before Europeans arrived?
- π When did the term "Nationality" first come into use? How did ancient civilizations refer to themselves? By ethnicity?
- π What did Native Americans know, or speculate, about the Old world?
- π Why did quill pens persist until the early 19th century despite the capacity to make metal dip pens?
- π Were bookshops 'common' in the late 19th century, and how did they differ from modern ones?
- π In what ways did the rise of a true middle class in Europe during the late 19th century become apparent?
- π How did native Hawaiians achieve such a high literacy rate prior to the 1850s?
- π Why did Native Americans originally migrate to the Americas?
- π How did diplomats of the Axis powers travel and communicate among themselves in World War II
- π How did the Roman army go from constantly losing battles in the middle of the 3rd century to winning almost everything?
- π How common was it for Americans to visit Europe in the late 19th century?
- π What was the first instance of native Americans using gunpowder weapons in battle and did they ever make their own powder?
- π How did society regard identical twins in the 17th century in Europe?
- π How were ethnographic maps in the 19th century made?
- π How did mid-19th century American legislation affect the corporate structure of railroad companies?
- π How did 19th century politicians discredit rivals?
- π How did militia barracks look in the 19th century?
- π How did laborers travel from China to Malaya in the early 19th century?
- π How did one get accepted into university in 19th century England?
- π How did native Americans and European colonists conduct their trades?
- π How did Native Americans defend militarily?
- π Did the "loss" of the American territories in the first third of the 19th century have any impact on Spanish intellectual discourse?
- π How long did Jews in hiding take to reveal themselves at the end of WW2? What was their reception?