Native American Heritage Anyone?

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My grandmother is a card carrying Jumano - a loose confederation of border natives and marranos. What is interesting is the Jewish heritage that all of these Natives share. Yes, Jewish!

I just wish at 26 I'd have a facial hair!
 
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Huh that's something new I never heard of. Jumano or Marranos. I'll have to look that up and see what I can find. And be careful what you wish for . When the hair on my face had some color in it, it wasn't that hard to shave and keep trim. Since it's going gray now it's like trying to shave barb wire!! lol

If you have any links about he Jumano or the Marrano, please post it !! I love to read about he different groups of people.


Wayne
 
I am decendant from Cherokee. The story goes that I had a freat grandfather that had given a horse and a pig as an offering to marry a woman who was a cherokee princess for that year. For anyone that doesn't know the princess thing is like a miss america pagent, only native american style.
 
In my community of Ojibwe and Odawa and Potowatamie (Anishiinaabe with Algonquin roots) our language says the word is Ikwe, or 'Kwe for woman. You might try to tell us that squaw is not a bad word, and give us links to try to prove it, but you won't hear any of us use it. If I see a young woman I refer to her as Kwe, woman, or Anishinaabekwe, Indian woman, or oshkiniigikwe, young woman, or mindimooyenh, old woman, or Ojibwekwe, Ojibwe woman. The name the Spirits know me by is Wabanokwe, Morning woman or more accurately, woman from the East.
I read some of the sites that you used to rationalize your theory. I also saw the line that talked about the etymology of words, and it used the N word as a comparison. Here is the quote from the site..."The etymology is perfectly innocent. The problem with squaw has nothing to do with its etymology. N***** has a perfectly unobjectionable etymology in Spanish negro 'black', for example. The difficulty with n***** is that it came to embody and represent a discriminatory attitude toward blacks. Similarly, the difficulty with squaw is that it is associated with a discriminatory attitude toward Indian people and sometimes by extension toward women generally." If in fact, the word squaw is a "whitenized" version of a word used by the Mass. Indians for woman, then what makes it okay to use it in a vulgar fashion to designate Native women in general? Is it any more ok to use it than it is to use the N word? No, I don't think so.
When a word is used to connotate a certain thing, and it's a bad connotation, then no matter what the origins of the original word may be, the word still comes out wrong. I can think of many words and I'm sure you can too, that fit this situation, and I'm sure that none of you would be satisfied with some kind of an excuse to say that they are okay to use. In this case the word was used by soldiers whose job it was to guard the Indian people in the concentration camps oops, I mean reservations, and keep them from getting out and bothering the white people oops, I mean keep them safe. They used it when referring to Indian women, especially when they (the soldiers) were looking for "a good time". I'm sorry, no matter what you say, the word is offensive to many Native women.
Not trying to cause any trouble or anything.
 
curliet, I understand. I did a lot of reading on this topic last night. Regardless of its origin, many find it offensive now and for that reason it is best not to use as somebody will invariably be offended. What I find strange is the use of the word by white people was usually not in a vulgar or offensive manner and that it was the Indian community that spread the "myth" of this offensive word, thus creating the offensive definition. Did you notice the responses of the people who said they never knew that or had only recently found that out? It seems only to be known as a vulgar or offensive term within the Indian community.

In reading the history of the word I found that many 20th century women opposed the use of it because it created a stereotype of Indian women, such as the ones you might find on a postcard with a photo of a "squaw and her papoose". Now, that one really stymied me. How dare they create a stereotype that depicts women as mothering, nurturing, caregivers... Makes no sense to me.
 
mac, because usually the picture of the squaw and her papoose were meant to show the enlightened population how backwards and primitive and squalid the squaw and papoose were. Not as appealing as a sweet mother in the nursery rocking her swaddled babe. LOL, I'm really not trying to be agumentative, just playing devils advocate with you. I do appreciate that you are seeing the nuances in this situation and hope that we can learn from one another.
But, I'll differ with you on something here. Maybe the white people that use the word today don't do it with any intention of vulgarity, but it was the WHITE soldiers that gave it the vulgar connotation in the first place. They looked for a woman, and the reason that they wanted that woman was, as I said before, "a good time". Those women were soon looked on as sexual objects, and the word for woman was then used as a general term for that kind of woman. As you said, the etymology of the word is fine, it meant woman, but the use of the word denoted a certain kind of woman.
After I wrote and posted my first reply, I got out my concise dictionary of Minnesota Ojibwe, and the word squaw isn't there at all. Of course, that's because it wasn't Ojibwe people who used the original form of that word. As I said, the elders that I learned what little of my language that I know, never used it at all.
This topic is very close to the same attitude that follows us around when we mention that having a football team called the redskins is offensive to us. You may not mean to be offensive when you paint your face red and do the tomahawk chop in the stands, but if we tell you how it makes us feel, and you continue to do that and use that term, it sends a message that just isn't good.
 
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Okay, I can't say I've ever really understood the team mascot controversy. Notre Dame has a mascot of the Fightin' Irishman. Am I supposed to be offended? Do you know how my people were treated in this country? I guess if somebody told me I should be offended, I could find it offensive.

All kidding aside, are you personally offended by these sports mascots or were you taught that you should be offended? I guess it could be hard to separate the two ideas, given a culture's influence on our individual ideologies.
 
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sorry I had to post, i saw pottawatomi and smiled. I am from northwest Indiana and am familiar with things in Michigan like the pottawatomie zoo and such. So when i saw it the first thing to come to mind is that zoo because i remember going to it as a kid often.
 
Well mac, there are some more of those etymology things at play here. For starters, Irishmen is a word that tells us that these are men from a certain part of the world, Ireland. They are men, and they are Irish. Very straightforward.
On the other hand there's the word Redskins. If you ask a Native person to hold out his or her arm, you'll notice that we aren't red. Most of us are kind of olive skinned. So right away, it's a misnomer. It isn't a word that distinguishes between men women or children either. And it doesn't tell us where these people are from, so what could it's purpose be? Why would we be called that? Back when the solution to all problems involving Native peoples could be solved by extermination, the folks were told that they could collect a bounty for proving that they had, in fact, exterminated an Indian. Lots of people went about making it their business to see to the extermination part, but then had to find a way to prove it. It was pretty messy, inconvenient and cumbersome to try to carry all those exterminated Indians to the govt office that was paying the bounty, so they began taking the scalp, or bloody red skin, to town to show the agent in charge. Soon the word redskin gained popular usage, like the word squaw, and for some reason it was considered a neat thing in later years to name sporting teams that term.
And, to make matters worse, some of them use some of our own customs, regalia and sacred items to wave around. For years I saw the Illinois mascot wearing his full headdress which to us is a thing that is worn by a chief who has shown his leadership and warrior skills and earned all those Eagle feathers. It's never touched by anyone else and is worn only for important ceremonies and events. He also carried a pipe, a very sacred object used by certain people in the tribe who have been chosen for their spiritual leadership, maybe could be compared to a priest or bishop, and again, not carried around for a basketball game, only used in most sacred of ceremonies. And then he would hop around the arena like a gymnast, which some people might erroneuosly compare to the dances done by our people in order to tell stories and depict important events.
Again, use the alternatives in your mind and tell me if you think they would be accepted for this use. How about the GA N -word. Or the Philly W**s (the old slang for Italians. The New York Ki***s. Would you want your kids to play on a team from a school that used those terms? Please remember that most people try to tell us we shouldn't be offended by this, that they are trying to honor us. Then give us that respect by using our true names, a lot of us wouldn't object to that.
Again, not trying to cause any trouble or anything, just making an effort to help you understand.
 
Yet you were fairly quick to dismiss my claim against the Fighting Irish mascot. The mascot depicts a stout little Irishman, dressed in green, with his fists raised. Doesn't that perpetuate the stereotype of the drunken, brawling Irishman?

I understand what you are saying. Yet at times I feel some are overly sensitive or for whatever reason wish to continue to be portrayed as downtrodden. I do believe some of the explanations that you've given as to why certain words are objectionable have a certain amount of fallacy mixed in to make them even more horrifying.

I once had a black woman tell me it wasn't proper to use the term "picnic" to promote a workplace outing. She said that the word's origins came from outings where white people would eat lunch in the grass while watching black people being lynched, "a pick a nig".
I told her I was pretty sure that it was derived from Old French. She was adamant that her explanation was correct because she had learned this from her grandmother when she was a little girl. The next day she brought in a copy of a random internet page that backed up her claim and very smugly pronounced me wrong.
How does one even begin to argue the incorrectness of this without stirring up such an emotionally charged beehive?

Should our goal be to stamp out the use of these words, to make them sound even more offensive, and "educate" every person who unintentionally, and inoffensively uses them on how offensive they now are? Or should we be more tolerant of everybody, realizing that the average person can't know everything that could possibly offend anybody and let the offensive meanings die?

At what point do we call this PC run amok? Should we each carry around a revisionist dictionary that tells us which words are acceptable this decade and which are not?

Curliet, thanks for the candid chat. I'm not causing any trouble either... Just letting you know where I'm coming from.
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