North American Ethnonymy

My OED work on North American tribal names (ethnonyms) arises ultimately from my interest in Ojibway, the dominant Native American language of the north-eastern portion of my home state of Minnesota. As a child, I learned bits of Ojibway (then usually called Chippewa and now often Anishinabe) from my grandfather and was surrounded by the Ojibway place names of the upper Great Lakes region.

I also worked for several years as a national park ranger on Isle Royale in northern Lake Superior, a situation which gave me the opportunity to research Ojibway toponymy and natural history terminology. I published two papers on place names, and my interest broadened into the Algonquian language family of which Ojibway is a member and into Native American languages in general.

I have worked on 361 ethnonyms in the last three years. Of these, 111 are in OED2 and 250 are new. (I use the term ethnonym loosely also to include glossonyms, the names of language families, languages, and dialects.) I have relied on two masterpieces of reference literature in the field: the Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico, edited by F.W. Hodge (1907-10), and the massive Handbook of North American Indians,W. Sturtevant, General Editor (1978- ?), being published by the Smithsonian Institution.

The framework constructed from those sources is filled out with citations from primary sources chosen specifically for their productivity of ethnonyms. Some of the suggested new entries have as few as four or five supporting quotations, but most have many more: Arkansa (1698-1946), Assiniboine (1684-1996), Iowa (1698-1996), Nadowessie (1698-1880), Otagamie (1698-1901), Otoe (1698-1996), and Saulteaux (1660-1996), for instance, all have more than twenty.

Though Tionontati, the name of an Iroquoian people closely associated with the Huron of southern Ontario, is not in the OED and despite its distinctly un-English appearance, it is supported by 15 citations. Cahokia, Kaskaskia, Michigamea, Peoria, and Tamaroa, subdivisions of the Illinois people, are absent from the OED but now have enough documentary support to warrant consideration.

In addition to proposing new entries, I have found substantial additional material for existing entries. Dogrib, for example, is in the OED from 1881, but I have found more than 20 citations for the period 1744-1881. Also already in the OED, but in no ethnonymic sense, are Cayuse (as a breed of horse), now with 18 ethnonymic citations from 1828 to 1998, and Chinook (as a trading jargon and a warm wind of western North America), now with 25 ethnonymic citations (1805-1998); both will now have more adequate etymologies.

Ethnonyms provide new meanings also for Moor n.2 , Moravian n.2 , stone n., and Stinkard, the latter a translation of the French Puan, a name for the Winnebago people of eastern Wisconsin, which was itself adopted briefly by English-speakers. Red Knife, Yellow Knife, Copper (mine), and Tatsanottine, none of which has an entry in the OED, are all etymologically related names for an Athapaskan people of the Northwest Territories.

The new words Lakota and Nakota are etymologically equivalent to Dakota (already in), and Nagailer deserves its place alongside its (unobvious) etymological sibling Takulli. The new word Poet is the equivalent of the boine of Assiniboine. There are difficulties in the lexicography of ethnonyms that are similar to those encountered in any terminological system.

Perhaps the most obvious and troubling to me is the problem of comprehensiveness: considering the ethnonym system as a whole, one might prefer that if any name at a given hierarchical level-say, dialects of a particular language-is included, then all should be. Such exhaustiveness is not, however, the aim of the OED; the aim is rather the inclusion of all words that are a significant part of the corpus of printed English. While the names of some Kwakiutl tribes, for instance, warrant inclusion, others appear too seldom (or not at all in non-technical English) to have a place.

Other problems, confusion foremost among them, are more peculiar to North American ethnonyms. There is an incredible profusion of variant spellings: transcriptions were often made under ethnographically difficult conditions by untrained and sometimes only semi-literate people during initial European expansion.

Some names came into English from as many as two or three other languages, resulting in further proliferation of forms. In the Mississippi valley, for instance, French, Spanish, and English were all in use at the same time, as were English, Dutch, and Swedish in the eastern U.S., and English and Russian in Alaska. Confusingly similar or even identical names were applied to wholly unrelated peoples, or, more confusing still, to neighbouring or related groups. The Ahtna are an Athapaskan-speaking people of southern Alaska, while Atnah was borrowed from a Takulli name for the Salishan Shuswap people of British Columbia. Blackfoot refers to an Algonquian-speaking Plains people and to a division of the Siouan-speaking Teton.

The Cancy are the Athapaskan Plains Apache, and the Kansa are nearby Siouan-speakers. Montagnais is a generic French term ('mountain-dweller') that came to be applied especially to an Algonquian people of Quebec and Labrador and to the Athapaskan Mountain people of the Northwest Territories.

The Squamish and the Suquamish are two distinct Salishan-speaking peoples, one in British Columbia, the other in Washington State. The Athapaskan-speaking Tanana and Tanaina, whose names are etymologically unrelated, occupy adjacent territories in southern and central Alaska. Names often classified peoples and languages in ways that conformed neither with ethnolinguistic reality, nor with the named peoples' concepts of their own identities.

This was particularly true of ethnonyms adopted by Euro-Americans: these were in many instances borrowed from neighbouring groups and so were frequently derogatory (enemy, foreigner). The lexicography of North American ethnonyms is difficult and sometimes frustrating, but few areas of study reward the researcher with greater insight into the interrelationships of language and history. My work is, as friends and family have pointed out, quite narrow and specialized, but, along with the work being done in innumerable other fields, it provides the building blocks of the OED.

See Alan Hartley's web site, Maritime History Citations for the OED