🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Aug9.150547.23732@enea.se> sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog) writes:
|Janis Maria Cortese (cortese@skid.ps.uci.edu) writes:
|>Why not just use their nation names?
|
|Good point. Why say "Indian" or whatever when you the guy is a Cherokee?

Of course the difficulty here is twofold.  First the enormous number of
different tribes, so many that most people are not familiar with more than
a very few of them (How many of you, outside of Alaska, have heard of the
tlingit?).  Indeed, many of the tribes are so small, and so thoroughly
assimilated that my "Dictionary of American Indian Tribes" does not have an
indigenous name for them, only a French or Spanish one, or is a few cases
an English one.

Secondly, the most common name for certain *major* tribes is not thier own
name for themselves, but the name used by a neighboring tribe.  The most
unpleasant cases of this are "Apache" and "Sioux", which both mean "enemy".
['Sioux' is Chippewa, and was what they clled thier traditional enemies,
the Dakota ("The Alliance"), 'Apache' is similarly the Zuni word for the
people that call themselves something like 'ndene' ("The People")].

Hmm, this brings up another problem, most English speakers could not
even come close to pronouncing 'ndene'.

Of course then one needs to deal with all of the tribes with names that
have come to mean something else, Illinois, Ohio, Miami, Ottowa, not
to mention Dakota.
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