Redskin is a slang term for Native Americans in the United States and First Nations in Canada. The term redskin underwent pejoration through the 19th to early 20th centuries and in contemporary dictionaries of American English, it is labeled as offensive, disparaging, or insulting. Although the term has almost disappeared from contemporary use, it remains in use as a sports team name. The most prominent was the NFL's Washington Redskins, who resisted decades of opposition before retiring the name in 2020 following renewed attention to racial justice in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and subsequent protests. While the usage by other teams has been declining steadily, 37 high schools in the United States continue to use the Redskins name. School administrators and alumni assert that their use of the name is honoring their local tradition and not insulting to Native Americans.
The origin of the choice of red to describe Native Americans in English is debated. While related terms were used in anthropological literature as early as the 17th century, labels based on skin color entered everyday speech around the middle of the 18th century. "At the start of the eighteenth century, Indians and Europeans rarely mentioned the color of each other's skins. By midcentury, remarks about skin color and the categorization of peoples by simple color-coded labels (red, white, black) had become commonplace."
Red as a racial identifier
Documents from the colonial period indicate that the use of red as an identifier by Native Americans for themselves emerged in the context of Indian-European diplomacy in the southeastern region of North America, becoming common usage in the 1720s. Subsequently, variations of "red men" were adopted by Europeans, becoming a generic label for all Native Americans.
Linguistic evidence indicates that, while some tribes may have used red to refer to themselves during the pre-Columbian era based upon their origin stories, the general use of the term was in response to meeting people who called themselves white and their slaves black. The choice of red rather than other colors may have been due to cultural associations, rather than skin color. Red and white were a dichotomy that had pervasive symbolic meanings in southeastern Native cultures which was less prevalent among northern tribes. While there was occasional use of red in Native American-European diplomacy in the northeast, it was still rare there even after it had become common in the southeast. Instead, Indian was translated into the native languages there as "men", "real people", or "original people". Usage in the northeast region by Europeans may have been largely limited to descriptions of tribes such as the Beothuk of Newfoundland, whose practice of painting their bodies and possessions with red ochre led Europeans to refer to them as "Red Indians". The personification of the Americas was staged at Whitehall Palace in December 1613 by a dancer in The Somerset Masque wearing "a skin coat the colour of the juice of mulberries, on her head large round brims of many coloured feathers, and in the midst of it a small crown".Peter Holman, The Masque at the Earl of Somerset's Marriage, 1614 (Scholar Press, 1973), spelling modernised here: Virginia Mason Vaughan, Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 2005), p. 71.
Early ethnographic writers used a variety of terms; olivastre (olive) by François Bernier (1684),Anonymous [F. Bernier], "Nouvelle division de la terre par les différentes espèces ou races qui l'habitent" , Journal des Sçavants, 24 April 1684, p. 133–140. rufus (reddish, ruddy) by Linnaeus (1758),Linnaeus, Syst. Nat. ed. 10 Vol. 1. p. 21 . kupferroth ("copper-red") by Blumenbach (1779),Blumenbach, J. F. 1779. Handbuch der Naturgeschichte vol. 1, pp. 63f and eventually simply "red" by René Lesson (1847).Charles Hamilton Smith, Samuel Kneeland, The Natural History of the Human Species (1851), p. 47 , listing "Red Race" as one of the six races identified by René Lesson, Description de mammifères et d'oiseaux récemment découverts; précédée d'un Tableau sur les races humaines (1847), i.e. White (Caucasian), Dusky (Indian), Orange-colored (Malay), Yellow (Mongoloid), Red (Carib and American) and Black (Negroid). Early explorers and later Anglo-Americans termed Native Americans "light-skinned", "brown", "tawny", or "russet", but not "red" prior to the 19th century. Many did not view Natives as distinctly different in color from themselves, and thus could be assimilated into colonial society, beginning with conversion to Christianity.
In the modern debate over sports teams with the name, Oklahoma News 4 asserted that Oklahoma should change its name. The name translates from Choctaw as 'red people' ( 'people' + 'red'). However, has a number of possible meanings in Choctaw, one of which is "humma, an addition to a man's name which gives him some distinction, calling on him for courage and honor." The name Oklahoma was created in 1866 by Principal Chief Allen Wright (Choctaw, 1826–1885). The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma states that in the Choctaw language Okla means "people" and humma means "red."Meserve, John Bartlett. Chronicles of Oklahoma vol. 19, no. 4, December,1941. Retrieved December 17, 2012. Chronicles of Oklahoma
Origins of redskin in English The first combination of red with skin, to form the term redskin, is dated to 1769 by Ives Goddard, linguist and curator emeritus in the Department of Anthropology of the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution. Goddard begins by pointing out that what had previously been considered the earliest English use of the term, a letter purported to have been written to an Englishman living in Hadley, Massachusetts in 1699, was spurious.The letter supposedly contains both "ye Red Skin Men" and "ye Red Skins". Based on this source, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) had suggested that the term was specifically applied to the Delaware Indians and "referred not to the natural skin color of the Delaware, but to their use of vermilion face paint and body paint". Goddard pointed out that OED had mis-dated the source, the letter was in fact a piece of historical fiction written in 1900.The OED agreed with Goddard's findings, stating that the quotation was "subsequently found to be misattributed; the actual text was written in 1900 by an author claiming, for purposes of historical fiction, to be quoting an earlier letter".
Goddard's alternative etymology is that the term emerged from the speech of Native Americans themselves, and that the origin and use of the term in the late 18th and early 19th century was benign. When it first appeared "it came in the most respectful context and at the highest level. ... These are white people and Indians talking together, with the white people trying to ingratiate themselves". The word later underwent a process of pejoration, by which it gained a negative connotation. Goddard suggests that redskin emerged from French translations of Native American speech in Illinois and Missouri territories in the 18th century. He cites as the earliest example a 1769 set of "talks", or letters, from chiefs of the Piankeshaw to Col. John Wilkins an English officer at Fort de Chartres. One letter included "", which was translated as 'if any redskins', and the second included "", which was translated as 'all the redskins'. The term here refers to warriors specifically. The term redskin enters wider English usage only in the first half of the 19th century. However, in an interview, Goddard admitted that it is impossible to verify whether the French translations of the Miami-Illinois language were accurate.
The term was used in an August 22, 1812, meeting between President James Madison and a delegation of chiefs from western tribes. There, the response of Osage chief "No Ears" (Osage: ) to Madison's speech included the statement, "I know the manners of the whites and the red skins," while French Crow, principal chief of the Wahpekute band of Santee Sioux, was recorded as having said, "I am a red-skin, but what I say is the truth, and notwithstanding I came a long way I am content, but wish to return from here." However, while these usages may have been earliest, they may not have been disseminated widely. While the 1812 meeting with President Madison was contemporaneously recorded, the records were not published until 2004.
The earliest known appearance of the term in print occurred in multiple periodicals in October 1813 quoting a letter dated August 27, 1813. It concerned an expedition during the War of 1812 led by General Benjamin Howard against Indians in the Illinois and Mississippi territories: "The expedition will be 40 days out, and there is no doubt but we shall have to contend with powerful hordes of red skins ..."
Goddard suggests that a key usage was in a 20 July 1815 speech by Meskwaki Chief Black Thunder at the treaty council at Portage des Sioux, in which he is recorded as stating, "My Father – Restrain your feelings, and hear ca[l]mly what I shall say. I shall tell it to you plainly, I shall not speak with fear and trembling. I feel no fear. I have no cause to fear. I have never injured you, and innocence can feel no fear. I turn to all, red skins and white skins, and challenge an accusation against me." This speech was published widely, and Goddard speculates that it reached James Fenimore Cooper. In Cooper's novels The Pioneers (published in 1823) and The Last of the Mohicans (1826), both Native American and white characters use the term. These novels were widely distributed, and can be credited with bringing the term to "universal notice". The first time the term appears in Bartlett's "Dictionary of Americanisms" (in 1858), Goddard notes, the illustrative reference is to Last of the Mohicans.
Johnathan Buffalo, historic preservation director of the Meskwaki, said that in the 1800s redskins was used by the tribe for self-identification. Similarly, they identified others as "whiteskins" or "blackskins". Goddard's evidence for indigenous usage includes a 1914 phonetic transcription of the Meskwaki language in which both 'one with brown skin' and 'one with red skin' were used to refer to Indians, while 'one with white skin, white person' was used to refer to Europeans. However, the pre-contact Meskwaki use of red in identifying themselves did not refer to skin color, but to their origin stories as the "red-earth" people.
Historian Darren Reid of Coventry University states it is difficult for historians to document anything with certainty since Native Americans, as a non-literate society, did not produce the written sources upon which historians rely. Instead, what is cited as Native American usage was generally attributed to them by European writers. Any use of red in its various forms, including redskin, by Native Americans to refer to themselves reflected their need to use the language of the times in order to be understood by Europeans.
Sociologist James V. Fenelon makes a more explicit statement that Goddard's article is poor scholarship, given that the conclusion of the origin and usage by Natives as "entirely benign" is divorced from the socio-historical realities of hostility and racism from which it emerged.
Pejoration