Once borrowed into English these terms were carried with it across the
continent as settlement (or the invasion) spread. Such terms were probably
generally assumed popularly to be either part of a universally understood
Native American language or even English, and appropriate for discussing
and/or communicating with Native Americans. The demeaning connotations of
such terms stem not from their original senses, but from the cultural
attitudes of the users, as exhibited in the notion that distinct terms for
Native American persons and artifacts with European analogues were
actually needed. Relatively few new terms were borrowed from more Westerly
languages as they were encountered, e.g., tepee from Dakotan, various terms
from Spanish in Texas and the Southwest, etc.
However, there are factors apart from racism at work here. Not only were/are
these special terms for Native Americans and Native American institutions
and artifacts a facet of racist attitudes as used in everyday English, they
were also a part of the contact language or pidgin used in communications
with Native Americans, and presumably originated in it. Of course, the
Algonquian terms were originally useful because they were known to the
Native American participants in the dialogue, but the pidgin became
institutionalized and was then used in areas where it was in some sense
less useful, because the Native Americans of the area didn't speak Algonquian
languages, or spoke Algonquian languages so divergent from the New England
pattern that words from New England languages were unrecognizable.
In such situations the English speakers were either using the pidgin because
its use had become institutionalized, or because they assumed in ignorance
that all Native Americans spoke the same language, perhaps even the pidgin
itself, while the Native Americans were using it because its use was
institutionalized and/or they assumed in ignorance that the words in question
were English. This may strike us as peculiar and perhaps counterproductive,
but it is what happens with pidgins (and with contact situations in
general).
As far as the stigmatic use of these terms in everyday English, I wonder to
what extent this is a relatively late phenomenon, fostered by popular
literature and then Hollywood. I haven't seen or done any real work on this,
but I don't recall that terms of this nature are common in the diaries and
memoirs of early English writers. I think that writers tend to put them in
the mouth of their characters ex post facto to give the text color, just as
someone writing about France might put the occasional French word into the
dialogue.
This experience is analogous with what happened in Australia, where most of
the words in the contact language are from languages spoken near the
original settlements in the south, e.g., gin `Native Australian woman',
kangaroo, etc. Here, too, these words from a few languages near the
original settlements became part of the contact pidgin used across the
continent by both sides of the contact situation, and were also adopted into
use in Australian English for references to native phenomena.
Incidentally, Native American languages also have and use similar
terminologies for Euroamericans and other Native American groups. There
seems to be a universal human tendency to look askance at outsiders. A term
s^aha~ in various more southerly Siouan languages for speakers of Dakotan
dialects has also been folk-etymologized as referring to genitalia, but
doesn't actually do so. It's more likely to have something to do with the
term s^ahi used of various Algonquian groups.
John Koontz (koontz@bldr.nist.gov)
---The views expressed herein are my own, and do not reflect the views, policy, or practice of my employers.