Here in Maine, the state legislature is taking up a bill to ban the use of the word squaw in place-names. Native Americans contend that it is a vulgarity, meaning prostitute or c*** rather than woman. Was this a general word that was used in many languages, or was it specific to one or two? Are there any old Native American songs or poems that might use this word in a more ordinary sense, revealing that it is not as degrading as they might contend, or is it absent from N.A. literature, indicating that it is indeed vulgar? If it is found in the literature, are other “vulgar” words used as well? –Paul Mattor, Hollis, Maine
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The idea that squaw means vagina (to use the polite term) first found its way into print in a polemical 1973 book, Literature of the American Indian, by Thomas E. Sanders and Walter W. Peek. Sanders and Peek, without offering evidence, advanced the theory that squaw derived from the Mohawk word ojiskwa’ (sources vary on spelling), meaning vagina. This notion appealed to a certain mind-set and was circu-lated widely in the activist com-munity. In 1992 it was revealed to the world at large on Oprah by Native American spokesperson Suzan Harjo: “The word squaw is an Algonquin [sic] Indian word meaning vagina, and that’ll give you an idea of what the French and British fur trappers were calling all Indian wo-men, and I hope no one ever uses that term again.” This marked the beginning of organized efforts to remove the word squaw from place-names, a campaign that continues today, so far with mixed success.
Hey, free country. Except that squaw doesn’t mean vagina. “It is as certain as any historical fact can be that the word squaw that the English settlers in Massachusetts used for ‘Indian woman’ in the early 1600s was adopted by them from the word squa that their Massachusett-speaking neighbors used in their own language to mean ‘female, younger woman,’ and not from the Mohawk ojiskwa’, ‘vagina,’ which has the wrong shape [sound], the wrong meaning, and was used by people with whom they then had no contact. The resemblance that might be perceived between squaw and the last syllable of the Mohawk word is coincidental.” This comes to us from Ives Goddard, a specialist in linguistics and a curator at the Smithsonian Institution, writing in News From Indian Country, mid-April 1997.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Slug Signorino.
