I named my pillow “Squaw”.
I put many hours into this pillow cover—original sketches, to hand cutting the silhouette and feathers, to the careful assembly and construction of the final product—naively thinking no one in the Etsy community would take it out of historical context. Alas, one Etsy seller from the Native American community, followed shortly by her accomplice in the “squaw” tag witch hunt, had a BIG problem with what they considered the white man’s derogative use of the word. The “accomplice” insinuated that I was a “non-native”, assuming authority over the topic, never mind that I too might be a descendant of a native tribe. Regardless, I must have come off as an insensitive, white male fur trapper. But hey, what about the popular “Squaw Dance”, celebrated by the Navaho as a right-of-passage of young girls into womanhood? Hasn’t anyone heard of Squaw Bread???
I obliged to the first person’s request to change the name, because she fairly and very articulately stated her reasons and convinced me that enough people in OUR Native American community may take offense to this word (although, perhaps the bulk of them are misinformed in believing “Squaw” means “vagina”, and might not otherwise care. This incorrect theory was widely publicized on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Nice work, O!). Bottom line, I asked myself, “It is worth upsetting people over a pillow (a soft and cuddly pillow, mind you), potentially leading to death threats in my Etsy inbox?”
Here’s an explanation from linguist Ives Goddard that discounts the “vagina theory” (my source was a downloaded pdf of an article he had written for the April 1997 issue of News From Indian Country. Google “The True History of the Word Squaw” to find it:
“It is as certain as any historical fact can be that the word squaw that the English settlers in Massachusetts used for “Indian woman” in the early 1600s was adopted by them from the word squa that their Massachusett-speaking neighbors used in their own language to mean “female, younger woman,” and not from Mohawk ojiskwa’ “vagina,” which has the wrong shape, the wrong meaning, and was used by people with whom they then had no contact. The resemblance that might be perceived between squaw and the last syllable of the Mohawk word is coincidental. Such partial resemblances between words of different meanings in different languages are common and of no significance. I suppose someone might claim that the meanings of these words are similar, but to do that would be to adopt the viewpoint that those “fur-trappers” are being accused of.”
Well put. This is informative as well—a woman’s perspective: http://www.nativeweb.org/pages/legal/squaw.html
