During the entire history of America until the turn of the twentieth century, Indigenous Americans were hunted, killed, and forcibly removed from their lands by European settlers.[19] This includes the paying of bounties beginning in the colonial period with, for example, a proclamation against the Penobscot Indians in 1755 issued by King George II of Great Britain, known commonly as the Phips Proclamation.[20][21] The proclamation orders, “His Majesty’s subjects to Embrace all opportunities of pursuing, captivating, killing and Destroying all and every of the aforesaid Indians.” The colonial government paid 50 pounds for scalps of males over 12 years, 25 pounds for scalps of women over 12, and 20 pounds for scalps of boys and girls under 12. Twenty-five British pounds sterling in 1755, worth around $9,000 today —a small fortune in those days when an English teacher earned 60 pounds a year.[20] Since the proclamation itself does not use the word, citing it as the origin of redskin as another word for scalp has also been called revisionist history.[22] However, a historical association between the use of redskin and the paying of bounties can be made. In 1863, a Winona, MN newspaper, the Daily Republican, printed among other announcements: The state reward for dead Indians has been increased to $200 for every red-skin sent to Purgatory. This sum is more than the dead bodies of all the Indians east of the Red River are worth. [23] This association can evoke strongly negative sentiments. In a 2014 interview, one activist commented: The name itself actually dates back, you know, at the time when the Native American population was being exterminated, and bounty hunters were hired to kill Native American people. And so, you know, one could make a great living off of just killing Native American people. And there was a tier effect that was paid out. You know, the highest paid was for a Native American man and then a woman and then a child. And so, based off of that, there were news clippings and flyers and stuff that were posted up, asking people to go out to kill Indians and bring back the red skin. So, in order to show that they made their kill, they had to bring back a scalp or their skin. And so, that’s where the Redskin word has been kind of passed down. So, in our community, we do not use that word.[24] A linguistic analysis of 42 books published between 1875 and 1930 shows that negative contexts in the use of redskin were significantly more frequent than positive usage.[10] However, the use of the word Indian in a similarly selected set of books was nearly the same with more frequent negative than positive contexts,[10] suggesting that Redskin was not a derogatory term, but that most portrayals of Native Americans were negative in general. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redskin_(slang)
Posted on: Tue, 24 Jun 2014 00:44:38 +0000
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