Neddy's Palaver

In the mid 1600s, the Catholic BRENT family sailed across the Potomac from Maryland to Aquia, Virginia and settled at the Colony of Brenton. This was the first Catholic settlement in English Virginia. When the BRENTS were colonizing Maryland, Giles BRENT had done just as John ROLFE, who had married an Indian princess at Jamestown. BRENT’s bride was a 12-year-old student or ward of his spinster sister Margaret BRENT, who was operating a school for the Piscataway children. When GILES claimed almost all the land of the Maryland Colony due to his marriage to the Piscataway chief’s daughter, he got himself, and his BRENT sisters, into a dangerous situation with the Lord Baltimore government. The BRENTS were forced to cross the river and live in Virginia.

Margaret BRENT was America’s first suffragette, but few have ever heard of her. She was an outstanding, accomplished women. She acted as Lord Baltimore’s attorney, and in fact was probably running the government of the colony. She was able to own property, because she never married, and she even demanded the right to vote. It was denied of course, but the Marylanders did bestow upon her the title of “Gentleman” Margaret BRENT. After the move to Virginia, she seemed never quite so powerful, probably because of her “out of favor” Catholic religion.

This plaque is at the Crucifix Monument on the east side of Jefferson Davis Highway, at Telegraph Road, in Aquia, Virginia.

“Questionable Naming Rights” by Mike Wise, appearing in The Washington Post, attempts to prove that the name of Washington’s football team is racist. However, the author is guided solely by his personal emotions. He does attempt to document his reasoning, yet, he uses sources that have already been thoroughly discredited.

The most disturbing part is, the Redskins annually present data rationalizing their callous insistence on keeping the name … . On Page 272 of the team’s media guide, readers are even given a Reader’s Digest version of where the term came from. “The term redskin . . . was inspired not by their natural complexion but by their fondness for vermillion makeup.”

However, long before the advent of “Reader’s Digest”, in 1634, while travelling up the Chesapeake Bay to settle the new colony of Maryland, Father Andrew White observed the natives and wrote in his journal:

“The natives are of tall and comely stature, of a skin by nature somewhat tawny, which they make more hideous by daubing, for the most part, with red paint mixed with oil, to keep away the mosquitoes … .” (Redskins of 1634)

Then Mr. Wise writes that because “The Baltimore Sun” recently claimed that the first Redskins coach, William “Lone Star” Dietz, “was a white man who was convicted of misrepresenting his [Indian] identity on military draft documents … there was no American Indian for which the team was named, just a perpetuated stereotype of the time.” This is illogical, for everyone believed Dietz to be the son of a full-blood Sioux Indian woman, he looks Indian in the picture here and he believed he was Indian. If he could now be proven not to have had Indian blood, what difference would that make to the actions of those in the past who believed that he did? He had played tackle at Carlisle Indian School of Carlisle, Pennsylvania and when he became coach of the Redskins he brought a number of Indian players with him to the new team. They even wore war paint and Indian bonnets at games.

Unfortunately, Mike Wise, cannot control his emotional impulses and wanders off into La-La land claiming that “Europeans introduced commercial scalping to North America“. Come on now - and what was the “commercial” use for the bloody scalps?

“When they started paying bounties for Indian bodies and Indian skulls as proof of an Indian kill, the trappers and mercenaries would come in with wagons full of men, women and children’s bodies and with gunny sacks of heads. It became a transportation and storage problem, so bounty payers began to pay for scalps in lieu of skulls and bloody red skins in lieu of bodies.”

It is quite unfortunate that so many people have accepted concocted stories such as that above, that the word “redskin“, in use since at least 1699, comes from the white man paying bounties for Indian scalps, which did not happen until more than fifty years later, when the British government first offered bounties for scalps during the French and Indian War. Fortunately, “WaPo” of today, has an erudite and researched article on this same subject: “A Linguist’s Alternative History of ‘Redskin’ - Term Did Not Begin as Insult, Smithsonian Scholar Says“. Also, here is material on the short-lived practice of the British paying for Indian scalps - Scalping During the French and Indian War.

Redskins and Warpaint

Redskins of 1634

The Redskin Bard, ~ Simon Pokagon

No Little Indian Boys

Chief Osceola Rides

Tracked at Michelle Malkin, Post Watch, The Political Teen and Dust My Broom.

Technorati: redskins, Washington Redskins

“one is a red skin as plain as paint and nature can make him” ~~James Fenimore Cooper

In a previous post, “Redskins and Warpaint”, I had traced the first use of the term “Redskin” for American Indian back to 1699.

There seems to be no etymological evidence that the word “redskin” originally meant anything other than “an aborigine with red skin”. According to Take Our Word For It, the earliest recorded use of the word was found in a quotation from 1699: “Ye firste Meetinge House was solid mayde to withstande ye wicked onsaults of ye Red Skins.”

I have just come upon a new reference from Father Andrew White’s travel log of 1634, which recorded his first impressions upon seeing the natives along the Chesapeake Bay. Aboard an English ship bound to settle the Maryland colony, he first noticed that their bodies were painted with earthen or plant-based red colors. It thus seems that they were named “Redskins” not only because of warpaint, but probably because all of the natives were accustomed to slathering their skins with their primitive yet effective version of insect repellant.

The natives are of tall and comely stature, of a skin by nature somewhat tawny, which they make more hideous by daubing, for the most part, with red paint mixed with oil, to keep away the mosquitoes; in this, intent more on their comfort than their beauty. They smear their faces also with other colors ; from the nose upwards, seagreen, downwards, reddish, or the contrary, in a manner truly disgusting and terrific. And since they are without beard almost to the end of life, they make the representation of beard with paint, a line of various colors being drawn from the tip of the lips to the ears.

Of course, mosquitoes were the curse of the early settlers and this method of the natives to ward them away seems practical, even if not beautiful to Father White’s tastes. The term “Redskin” was part if the language in 1823, when James Fenimore Cooper began writing his novels, using the term “red-skin natur” and “redskin“ generously throughout.

… Mabel, “for there are two Indians and only one white man.” “Pale face,” said the Tuscarora, holding up two fingers; “red man” holding up one. “Well,” rejoined Cap, “it is hard … of life and respectability about him; one is a red skin as plain as paint and nature can make him; but the third chap is half-rigged; being neither brig, nor schooner. … (The Pathfinder by James Fenimore Cooper, page 18).

Tracked at Don Surber and Room Q.

The Canadian government has a web page which is entitled “Aboriginal place names contribute to a rich tapestry“. It gives some of the place names of Canada which came from the language of the aboriginal people who lived there. The name “Canada” itself, comes from the Huron language word for settlement or village, “Kanata“.

Place names are never just meaningless sounds. Rather, they embody stories about the places to which they are attached. They give us valuable insights into history and provide clues about the country’s cultural and social development. A study of place names will always reveal the astounding diversity and depth of Aboriginal peoples’ contributions to contemporary Canada.

When I was growing up we had a children’s song to teach us to count -”Little Indian Boys“. I suppose that is no longer sung, as political correctness has probably banished it from the land.

No Little Indian Boys - anymore, and it is a cultural loss.