Sometimes awareness of cultural differences and concerns happens quickly. Witness how much many of us have learned about Afghan ethnic groups in the past three months.
But even in our own back yard, we sometimes take decades, even centuries, to catch on to cultural issues.
For instance, Oregon has 173 places whose names include the word squaw.
Some of us might not give the matter a second thought, but Native Americans and others object to use of the word. In their view, it stems from an anatomical reference to women.
Some scholars dispute whether the origins of the word support that translation but nevertheless agree that use of the word has become offensive.
Either way, the concerns have not been ignored. The Oregon Legislature approved a bill this year that bans the word from the names of public places. Several other states have similar laws.
Two weeks ago, the Oregon Geographic Names Board voted unanimously to recommend replacing the names of three of the 173 sites with other Native American words. The final decision is up to a federal board.
Some people oppose such changes. One legislator who voted against the bill in May said, “You can’t change history. History happened.”
Nevertheless, Oregonians and others can revise names applied in a less enlightened or more callous time. Last year Darkey Creek was renamed Southworth Creek, after Louis Southworth, a former slave and respected coastal resident.
At least twice in the past year, when stories in The Oregonian declared without dispute a linguistic history for squaw, readers have questioned the explanation given.
The stories said that the word derives from the Algonquin word for female genitalia. One story added that, starting with fur traders, it became a vulgar term for all Native American women.
One person who argues with that interpretation of linguistic history is Ives Goddard, an anthropologist with the Smithsonian Institution.
Goddard, who agrees that the word has become demeaning, argues that in the Algonquin family of languages, squaw comes from words that mean “woman,” with no disparaging intent.
Writing in the April 1997 issue of News from Indian Country, Goddard also denied an argument that says squaw came from a Mohawk word, ojiskwa, “which we can politely translate as ‘vagina.’ ” Mohawk, he said, is part of a different family of languages, and the third syllable is not related to the Algonquin word.
Suzan Shown Harjo, president and executive director of the Morning Star Institute, a national Indian rights organization based in Washington, D.C., dismisses Goddard’s thinking.
“Women and men fluent in the pertinent Native languages,” she wrote in a Feb. 28 column in Indian Country Today, say the word and variations of it “are in several tribal languages of the Algonquian and Iriquoian linguistic stocks. They are descriptive words for a woman’s genitalia.”
Trappers began calling all women by that word, she wrote, and English dictionaries “cleaned it up.”
Now the trend is reversing. Minnesota was the first state to ban squaw from public sites, Harjo said, with Montana, Oklahoma and Maine following.
What all of this means for newspaper journalists is pretty simple. When reporters and editors covering these issues cite one view or the other, they should attribute it, and not accept something stated as “fact” at face value.
The legislator was right when he said, “History happened.” However, history did not end in the last century. It happens every day, and efforts to remove an offensive word will continue. Journalists can record and explain the debate without deciding a word’s linguistic origins.
