We Are Always Somebody's Eskimo !!

 

It was the Summer of 1972 and I found myself at La Macaza , Québec ..... north of Montréal..... with about 70 native language teachers representing the seven major linguistic groups from all over the province. It's one thing to speak your language well .... but it's quite another game to teach it.... and teach it well !! And that is why we linguists were there ..... to help the young teachers reflect upon the workings of their specific tongues ...... avoir une pensée réfléchie sur le fonctionnement de leurs propres langues.....so as to be better able to explain them to their students back in their respective village schools..

One afternoon I was doing a workshop session with the Attikamekw group when a dozen or so Inuit women waltzed into my classroom...... talkative Edna Padlayat at their head. Now they could neither speak directly to he Attikamekw through their mother tongue.... for evident reasons..... nor through their second language since the Attikamekw used French and the Inuit used English..... so Edna asked me to interpret for them. She said that her people wanted the other groups to refer to them as Inuit and not as Eskimo , a term they considered to be highly offensive. ..... and even warned that if the "Indians " did not comply to their wishes that they ... the Inuit... would call them.... the "Indians " by the Inuktitut ( Inuit language ) pejorative word for them !! My first reaction was to say , " Let's all calm down , get out the tobacco and we smokum peäcepipe ! Just kidding ! No , I told Edna and her gang that I would give their message to the other native peoples and get back to them later  that same afternoon. So off the Inuit went.

In the meantime the Attikamekw people were just sitting there bewildered by it all .... not understaning what was being said. So I explained to them the gist of the Inuit request....... including the ultimatum. Their immediate reaction was anger .... and they wanted to know the "evil word " the Inuit used for "Indians "...... so I told them. " Iqqiliit "  which means "lice larvae bearers"..... and this really made the pot boil over !

To defuse the whole situation I reminded the Attikamkw that they themselves had lived with a similar problem for hundeds of years ..... a problem they had only recently resolved  both legally as well as from a sociological and media standpoint. Until 1970 they had been known in historical and anthropological literature and throughout Quebec by the less than flattering name Têtes - de - Boule or   Ballheads / Roundheads.so they notified the the federal and provincial governments , the media  , universities , etc that they were officially taking back their original name "Attikamekw Iriniak "... The Whitefish People . ... and vigourously rejecting the former scurrilous nickname. And now  , two years later , their request had been heeded to the grand satisfaction of all concerned.

Now before this post turns into a shaggy dog story in length I shall come to the point. Somewhere ....sometime .....someone began referring to the native people inhabiting the Arctic regions with the nomenclature "Eskimo ".... and it stuck! This term was believed  to mean "raw meat eater " .... and it likewise unfortunately stuck ! The truth of the matter is that the word "Eskimo " is  a White Man's pisspoor rendition of a perfectly positive  Cree word " ayaskimaw / ayastchimew ".... he / she speaks a foreign language . What is so frightening about this misnomer / monumental boner is that it has spread worldwde. While teaching at the Université de Bordeaux , France in 1991 I asked my students ... just for fun..... what the word Eskimo meant and 200 voices boomed back at me in unison , " mangeur de viande crue "..... "raw meat eater ". Just another case of the whiteman's misunderstanding and misuse of words borrowed from native North American languages .......... Many of us know how much wood a woodchuck could chuck but are unable to identify the animal when asked to do so. The word is on loan from any one Algonquian language " udjakw , oodjik or utchakw " and refers to a muskrat and not to the groundhog or marmot as informed North Americans think it does !   On this I rest my case !!  

P.S. I met with Edna and thee Inuit people later and explained in great detail what I have just summed up in these few lines That evening we held a social get-together for everybody and from that day onwards harmony ruled the campus...... so to speak.

P.S.2 My blogpost title is a rough translation of the title of the article  " On est toujours l'Esquimau de quelqu'un " , written by José Mailhot , Jean - Paul Simard and Sylvie Vincent in the review Études/ Inuit Studies , 1980 , No.4 .... an excellent artcle which shed light on and settled the question once and for all.