Native American groups got stuck with names chosen arbitrarily by European settlers. They were often derogatory names other tribes used to describe their rivals. For example, “Comanche” is derived from a word in Ute meaning “anyone who wants to fight me all the time,” according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
“It’s like having a map of North America where the United States is labeled ‘gringos’ and Mexico is labeled ‘wetbacks,’ ” Herman says. “Naming is an exercise in power. Whether you’re naming places or naming peoples, you are therefore asserting a power of sort of establishing what is reality and what is not.”
The Map Of Native American Tribes You’ve Never Seen Before
(via linguisten)
>#colonialism
>#racism
C’mon now, we call the Hungarians by a century-old ethnic slur for Germans*, the Poles call Germans “mutes” and Italians by a Germanic word for “foreigners”, and the Greenlanders call themselves by a different Germanic word for “foreigners”.
The classic example of the pejorative exonym is that the Shan and Palaung call the Jingpho by “an opprobrious term indicating mixed race or parentage”, and the Jingpho use the same name for the Chin.
The Ao in Mongsen call everyone on the other side of the Dikhu River from them “enemies”, the Moros of the Philippines call themselves, well, Moors, and I’m surprised there isn’t a paper on pejorative exonyms yet, if nothing else that seems like the sort of thing the internet would do
* well, it was probably around before it started being used as an ethnic slur for Germans, but
“Everyone’s been doing it” is an explanation, not an excuse or justification.
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