I have a question to ask about this topic, so I decided to create a new item.

28 responses total.

The terms "[American] Indian" and "Native American" used to refer to the
indigenous (at least relative to Europeans) peoples of North America are
obviously created by European settlers.  One - Indian - obviously "wrong,"
since Columbus was wrong in believing he had reaches the West Indies.  The
other - America[n] - is derived from Amerigo Vespugi, "discoverer" of the
North American continent.

So my question is, what did the native people call themselves as a whole?
Or did they only refer to their own nation as "us", and other nations as
"them?"  (e.g. "we" are Ojibway, "they" are Iriquois)

I get the impression that most names various groups call themselves mean "us"
or "people" or "humans".  Many of the names they told white settlers about
other tribes mean "enemy", "those jerks", 
"them funny looking guys over there", etc.  
Does anyone know if any of the names refer to occupation, appearance or general
locale?

This is a really neat item.

Oh, yeah, I forgot to ask what name(s) the Native Americans had for the
continent of North America itself?

I would not expect them to have understood the concept of a continent.

I would also not expect them to have had any collective name for themselves
(but excluding Europeans, etc.) until quite late in the game, for the same
reasons.

Remember that we're talking about a very diverse group of cultures, too.
A lot of people seem to think that all the indigenous peoples automatically
had things in common just in virtue of inhabiting the same two continents,
but actually I doubt that this is particularly true in any important way.
Even peoples from the same general area have some really striking cultural
differences, at least in some cases.  And where in Europe there were some
very widespread unifying cultural influences which touched the whole
continent (or almost all) quite a while back and which continued in force,
I don't think anything like this was true of the Americas as a whole.  (There
were definitely some large areas with some analogous factors, though.)

I know (meaning "have been told repeatedly by seemingly reliable sources")
that in many cases peoples had names for themselves which (it's claimed)
are reasonably translated something like "the people", but I've always been
curious as to what kind of evidence backs up this translation.  (In fact,
I'm in the middle of one of Tony Hillerman's mysteries, set among the Navajos,
and there are some contexts where he sometimes transliterates a word,
"Dineh" (I think) and sometimes uses the English word "People", referring
to the Navajos - pretty clearly the Navajo phrase is the same in both
cases.  For instance, "Slow Talking Dineh/People", a Navajo clan.)

I would conjecture that the development and widespread transmission of
alphabetic/phonetic writing was a major unifying influence on European
culture which was absent in the Americas.  This is a tremendously important
technological innovation; even in the absence of mass media of any kind,
it made possible the dissemination of ideas geographically and through time.

I bet it was exasperation at the foreigners for not understanding that
whatever the native peoples called themselves was their *name*, that
they agreed to letting the foreigners think it meant "people". Names
to most native cultures have a life of their own: they are symbols,
or totems, and are invoked ceremonially. How could totemic names
just "mean" what we mean by people? 

Re #5:
s/Dineh/Dinee/g

Re #6 re #5: I think it's people as in parallel to tribe/nation, not as in
persons.  But as I say, I've always wondered - I've seen this in many and
diverse sources (& relating to peoples from all around the world, too), but
that may just show that it's a common piece of misinformation.

Have you considered the possibility that what the native peoples meant by the 
word that they gave for their "people" is equivalent to the English word 
"human"?  I also think that whoever it was that said that these people couldn't
have had any conception of a "continent" is not aware of how weird and messed
up the European notion of a continent is.  Tell me, for example, what exactly
it is that makes Asia Asia and not Africa or Europe?  How is Australia a
continent. This is probably not appropriate for this conference, so I'll stop
there, but  hopefully you get the idea.  I think that no matter how much the
theory has  been bashed, the idea of language creating and at the same time
being created by a way of looking at the world can't be forgotten.  Don't
forget that what  _you_ mean by "the people" is not neccesarily whathe native
people meant. Probably all the more reason to distrust translations, but sad to
say, we can't all learn everybody's language, so *sigh* I guess translations
are a sort of  neccessary evil...

Oh yes!  You are so right!  I speak two langauges, and I am constantly torn
between how I see things in one language vs. how I see things in the other...I
am always asking myself, "I wonder what s/he *really* means?", if there is more
than one way to translate something someone's said in one of the language.
E.g., did you ever try to explain the difference between "to make" and "to do"
to someone whose language has only *one* word for our two?  Good luck! No doubt
the difference is greater between languages of different branches, e.g., any
native american language cf. an indo-european one... Regarding the concept of
continent, my husband is a product of the  Spanish school system and he insists
there are *five* continents, not seven (N & S america, and eurasia are the
different ones).  Makes more  sense to me...

even african doesnt' make sense.  I myself have grown up with three languages
and learned one in school.  I don't speak two of the ones I grew up hearing
but I do know that it is so HARD trying to explain what wome things mean!

There is at least one group of native Americans who referred to the continent
of North America (or some geographical approximationthereof) as "Turtle
Island~" implying that the land rose from the sea as does the carapace of a
surfacing sea turtle. This also implies knowledge of both coasts, not unlikely
among wandering tribes especially when you consider the oral tradition and the
passing of the story of the original arrival of humans on this continent.

        As far as names go, it is likely that individuals have totemic names in
addition to common names.  The name they tell you won't be the totemic, but
will likely be the common.  I've never heard of a totemic name for an entire
people...

"Eskimo", btw, mean "flesh-eater" -- a derogatory term.  They were originally
so-called because the missionaries who named them asked a neighboring tribe
what to call them.  They got the Native American equivalent (that language)
of "Dumb bastards."  Which is why they now prefer Inuit.  (Sioux, I understand
were similarly named by another tribe; they prefer Lakota.)  It has been 
assumed, in a similar vein, that the apparently widespread behavior of 
cannibalism comes in part from missionaries and others asking tribes 
(not just in America, but in Africa as well) how neighboring tribes
behaved.
Sorry for the tangent.
As far as names go, the issue of race is irrelevant until you are exposed
to others of a different race, and since the Native Americans weren't exposed
to any people who cared about race until Columbus (the Vikings and the 
chinese, whatever trade they did, didn't do enough to make an apparent
impact linguistically), they probably didn't have a collective name for
their race (except "humans").  Interesting question, though, if only
because it points out an interesting paradox of how to define a group
of peoples who were only perceived as such when looked at externally,
without using the terminology biased by the external group.

I remember in one of my classes my professor told us that "race" is a
European idea and that no other culture has words such as "race" native
to it.  ( I don't mean to say that there is one European culture ) 
It's interesting because even the European concept of race doesn't hold up
very well at all when you deal with most areas of the world.  It makes

sense then that Native Americans did not have any word for "race"  Since
I'm not familiar with any Native american languages, I can't really 
support this, though.  Does anyone here know any?

Wish I did. "race" seems silly to me.

yeah, it's pretty silly, but you can't avoid it really because its so much
a part of our lives to see people by race.  I think it would be interesting to 
not be shackled by that kind of vision, but it's impossible for me (and 
anyone else who grew up in a society like ours) to escape.

It may not be able to escape, but we can ceertainly attempt to move beyond.
I would think that there is no other word than ones meaning human because 
the Native di think and still do think that human is the best thing.
It is others who had to have a tag to hang on them and a tag to hangland.  Do
you know what Maerica was called before the Europeans got here?" ours"

Was it?  The Aborigines in Australia have little concept of owning the land;
the people live on the land, which has no ownership; same, allegedly, for the 
!Kung in AFrica.  So it would surprise me if the pre-Columbian aborigines
here conceived of possessing the land.

(sounds like another mistranslation to me. I too learned in school that as
a rule of thumb, the native Americans didn't not consider themselves
owners of any lands, but rather caretakers.)

(methinks we could stand to learn a lesson in attitude from those who came
before us.)

Believe it or not, the ancient Irish also felt that the land belonged to
the gods.  Kings could give out the right to use it, not to own it.

Again, it would be interesting to have some hard evidence at hand.  "The
native Americans" covers an incredibly diverse range of cultures, & I
mistrust such general statements (or should I say "stereotypes"?).  Does
anyone here actually have any *detailed* anthropological or ethnological
studies covering these kinds of things?  The idea that you can just lump
(say) llama-herders and corn-growers and buffalo-hunters together as if
it didn't matter that they were totally isolated from each other & lived
in very different ways - without *specific* investigation on specific
points of culture - is ludicrous.  European cultures have a history of
thousands of years of fairly widespread contact, even before modern mass
communications, with some major common factors that were directly
spread through the whole region, and even there you have to be careful
about generalizations.

I agree, it seems kind of silly for us to be talking about what we think the
"native Americans" collectively might have possibly thought about such
important things as land ownership, sense of people, etc. when we don't really
have any one presenting facts about actual cultures...

(hmm... sounds like a call to research...)

(I wonder where to begin looking.)

Research?  That's too much like work.  Armchair hypotheses are more fun. :-)

Re #22: A good place to *start* might be some subject scans on the
Mirlyn database.  (Unless you're getting *here* through merit:) Telnet
to hermes.merit.edu.  At Which host? enter mirlyn.  Follow the directions.
(This is the UM's online catalog.  If you're affiliated with the U, you
can look through the more specialized catalogs; otherwise, MCAT is
the one, if I recall.)

(hmm.. I can actually physically go to the U-M Grad library and do that.
sounds like something to do!)

The "caretaker" theory sounds like a pacific northwestern indian claim;
in fact I think there's a specific quote from a specific indian chief
(in english, mind you, so you can't argue it's a mis-translation) that
says just about exactly that.  No doubt different indians did have
different ideas on this.  However - most NA tribes were at least
semi-nomadic - so there is in fact no real reason for them to develop a
strong sense of land ownership.

why can't I argue that it's a mistranslation?  (assuming you're familiar
with the quote... )  did the chief speak/write in english?  

Considering the nonsense people who should know better utter about *our*
culture ... it would be interesting to have the original, though.

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