The English word squaw is an ethnic and sexual slur, historically used for Indigenous North American women. Contemporary use of the term, especially by non-Natives, is considered derogatory, misogynist, and racist.King, C. Richard, "De/Scribing Squ*w: Indigenous Women and Imperial Idioms in the United States" in the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, v27 n2 p1-16 2003. Accessed October 9, 2015
While squaw (or a close variant) is found in several Eastern and Central Algonquian languages, primarily spoken in the northeastern United States and in eastern and central Canada, these languages only make up a small minority of the Indigenous languages of North America. The word "squaw" is not used among Native American, First Nations, Inuit, or Métis peoples. Even in Algonquian, the words used are not the English-language word.
Status The term squaw is considered offensive by Indigenous peoples in America and Canada due to its use for hundreds of years in a derogatory context that demeans Native American women. This has ranged from condescending images (e.g., picture postcards depicting "Indian squaw and papoose") to racialized epithets.Green 1975 Alma Garcia has written, "It treats non-white women as if they were second-class citizens or exotic objects."
Newer editions of dictionaries such as American Heritage, Merriam-Webster online dictionaries, and the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary now list squaw as "offensive", "often offensive", and "usually disparaging".American Heritage Dictionary "squaw". Retrieved April 13, 2019.Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary."Squaw". Retrieved March 1, 2007.Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press, Oxford, England. Entry: "Squaw".
While some have studied the elements of Algonquian words that might be related to the word, the consensus among Native women, and Native people in general, is that—no matter the linguistic origins—the word is too offensive, and that any "reclamation" efforts would only apply to specific women from the Algonquian-language groups, and not to the vast majority of Native American women who feel degraded by the term. Indigenous women who have addressed the history and depth of this word state that this degrading usage is now too long, and too painful, for it to ever take on a positive meaning among Indigenous women or Indigenous communities as a whole.Feminist and anti-racist groups have also worked to educate and encourage the disuse of the term in normal discourse. When asked why "it never used to bother Indian women to be called squaw," and "why now?" an American Indian Movement group responded in 2006:
In 2015, Jodi Lynn Maracle (Mohawk) and Agnes Williams (Seneca) petitioned the Buffalo Common Council to change the name of Squaw Island to Deyowenoguhdoh. Seneca Nation President Maurice John Sr., and Chief G. Ava Hill of the Six Nations of the Grand River wrote letters petitioning for the name change as well, with Chief Hill writing,
The continued use and acceptance of the word 'Squaw' only perpetuates the idea that indigenous women and culture can be deemed as impure, sexually perverse, barbaric and dirty ... Please do eliminate the slur 'Squaw' from your community.
The Buffalo Common Council then voted unanimously to change the name to Unity Island.
In November 2021, the United States Department of the Interior, ("DOI") headed by Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, declared squaw to be a derogatory and racist term and began formally removing the term from use on the federal level. On September 8, 2022 the DOI officially replaced all place names containing the word and published a list of the new names.
History Eastern and Central Algonquian morphemes (smallest units of meaning) meaning "woman" (mostly found as components in longer words) include: Massachusett squàw ("woman"), Abenaki -skwa ("female, wife"), Mohegan-Pequot sqá, Cree iskwew / ᐃᐢᑫᐧᐤ (iskwew, "woman"), Ojibwe ikwe/ᐃᐦᑴ (ihkwe, "woman"). Variants in other related languages are: esqua, sqeh, skwe, que, kwa, exkwew, xkwe. These are all derived from Proto-Algonquian *eθkwe·wa ("(young) woman").Deborah Pelletier, Terminology Guide: Research on Aboriginal Heritage, Library and Archives, Canada, 2012. (PDF archived at internet archive) (Available on docplayer). Accessed September 24, 2016.Cutler 1994; Goddard 1996, 1997. Possibly as early as 1621. According to linguist Ives Goddard, the notion that the word originally referred to a woman's vagina is inaccurate.
In the first published report of Indigenous American languages in English, A Key into the Language of America, written in 1643, Puritan Minister Roger Williams wrote his impressions of the Narragansett language. Williams noted morphemes that he considered to be related to "squaw" and provided the definitions he felt fit them, as a learner, including: squaw ("woman"), squawsuck ("women"), keegsquaw ("virgin or maid"), segousquaw ("widower"), and squausnit ("woman's god"). In most colonial texts squaw was used as a general word for Indigenous women.
The Massachusett Bible was printed in the Massachusett language in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1663. It used the word squa in Mark 10:6 as a translation for "female". It used the plural form squaog in 1 Timothy 5:2 and 5:14 for "younger women".
A will written in the Massachusett language by a native preacher from Martha's Vineyard uses the word squa to refer to his unmarried daughters. In the Massachusett language, squa was an ancient and thoroughly decent word.
One of the earliest appearances of the term in English in print is "the squa sachim, or queen" in the colonial booklet Mourt's Relation (1622), one of the first chronicles of the Plymouth Colony written by European colonists, including the story of the Pilgrims' first Thanksgiving. The sachem or sachim is the elected chief of a Massachusett tribe, and the booklet used Pidgin Massachusett to call the chief's wife the "squa sachim".
Records accompanying sketches by Alfred Jacob Miller document mid-19th century usage of the term in the United States. Miller wrote notes in 1858–1860 for each picture, many of which included Indigenous women. These were published in the 1951 catalog of a Miller exhibition. For Indian Girl reposing, Miller wrote, "Before they are 16 years of age, these girls may be said to have their heyday, and even then if they become the wives or mates of Trappers, are comparatively happy, for they generally indulge them to their hearts' content; should they become however the squaws of Indians, their lives are subjected to the caprices of a tyrant too often, whose ill treatment is the rule and kindness their exception. Nothing so strikingly distinguishes civilized from savage life as the treatment of women. It is in every particular in favor of the former." For "Bourgeois" Walker, & his Squaw, Miller describes his depiction of the fur trader made in 1858 thusly:
"The sketch exhibits a certain etiquette. The Squaw's station in travelling is at a considerable distance in the rear of her liege lord, and never at the side of him. [Walker] had the kindness to present the writer a dozen pair of moccasins worked by this squaw – richly embroidered on the instep with colored porcupine quills."
Edgar Allan Poe uses the word in his 1838 novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.
The 1887 Canadian novel An Algonquin Maiden uses the term squaw four times; twice as "squaw-snake" to refer to a female snake, and twice to refer to a woman from an Algonquin tribe.
Colville / Okanagan author Mourning Dove, in her 1927 novel, Cogewea, the Half-Blood had one of her characters say,
If I was to marry a white man and he would dare call me a 'squaw'—as an epithet with the sarcasm that we know so well—I believe that I would feel like killing him.Mourning Dove. 1927 (1981 edition). Cogewea, the Half-Blood, p. 112. University of Nebraska Press. .
E. B. White's 1961 story "The Years of Wonder", derived from his 1923 journal of a shipboard trip to Alaska, included, "Mr. Hubbard ... saw that Siberia was represented by a couple of dozen furry Eskimos and one squaw man; they came aboard from a skin boat as soon as the Buford dropped her hook."
Science fiction author Isaac Asimov, in his novel Pebble in the Sky (1950), wrote that science-fictional natives of other planets would use slurs against natives of Earth, such as, "Earthie-squaw".Asimov, Isaac. 1971. Pebble in the Sky. Fawcett, Greenwich, Conn.
LaDonna Harris, a Comanche social activist who spoke about empowering Native American schoolchildren in the 1960s at Ponca City, Oklahoma, recounted:
We tried to find out what the children found painful about school [causing a very high dropout rate]. (...) The children said that they felt humiliated almost every day by teachers calling them "squaws" and using all those other old horrible terms.Harris, LaDonna. 2000. LaDonna Harris, A Comanche Life, edited by H. Henrietta Stockel, p. 59, University of Nebraska Press.
As a word referring to a woman, it was sometimes used to denigrate men, as in "squaw man", meaning either "a man who does woman's work" or "a white man married to an Indian woman and living with her people".Hodge, Frederick Webb. 1910. Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Bureau of Ethnology Bulletin 30. Retrieved November 16, 2007. This was a popular literary stereotype, as in The Squaw Man
Sexual references
An early comment in which squaw appears to have a sexual meaning is from the Canadian writer E. Pauline Johnson, who was of Mohawk heritage, but spent little time in that culture as an adult. She wrote about the title character in An Algonquin Maiden by G. Mercer Adam and A. Ethelwyn Wetherald:
Poor little Wanda! not only is she non-descript and ill-starred, but as usual the authors take away her love, her life, and last and most terrible of all, reputation; for they permit a crowd of men-friends of the hero to call her a "squaw" and neither hero nor authors deny that she is a squaw. It is almost too sad when so much prejudice exists against the Indians, that any one should write up an Indian heroine with such glaring accusations against her virtue, and no contradictory statements from either writer, hero or circumstance.Johnson, Pauline. 1892. "A Strong Race Opinion on the Indian Girl in Modern Fiction". Reprinted in Keller, Betty. 1987. Pauline: A Biography of Pauline Johnson, p. 119. Formac. .
Statements that squaw came from a word meaning "female genitals" gained currency in the 1970s, but have since been found to be inaccurate.
Efforts to rename placenames and terms
In November 2021, the U.S. Department of the Interior declared squaw to be a derogatory term and began formally removing the term from use on the federal level, with Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) announcing the creation of a committee and process to review and replace derogatory names of geographic features. In a press release, Secretary Haaland announced,
This follows decades of work by Indigenous activists, both locally and in more general educational efforts, to rename the locations across North America that have contained the word, as well as to eliminate the word from the lexicon in general. The work follows previous actions by the Board on Geographic Names which recognized place names containing words that were widely recognized as being pejorative or derogatory for Black and Japanese people.
In 1988 the E.B. Campbell Dam on the Saskatchewan River was officially renamed; formerly it had been the Squaw Rapids Dam. Ioway Creek (formerly Squaw Creek), a long tributary of the S. Skunk River in central Iowa, known for its flooding and flash flooding of several highly developed portions of the eastern and southeastern portions of the Iowa State University campus in the city of Ames, was officially renamed by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names on February 11, 2021.