hey guys friendly reminder from your fave Canadian that esk*mo is a slur so please don’t use it!
I see it usually in the context of “esk*mo kisses” which may pop up when people talk about their ships and their headcanon, but it means “snow eaters” in cree and is a slur against Inuit people so please just don’t use it!
and I would appreciate if u reblogged this because people outside Canada don’t seem to know this for the most part
This post is well-intentioned but not 100% accurate.
“Eskimo” is/was broadly used to refer to certain native peoples in Greenland, Canada, Alaska, and Siberia. Most, but not all of those groups find it offensive. In fact, “Inuit” is not considered an acceptable replacement term for all of these peoples. Here’s the breakdown:
Greenlandic Inuit (Kalaallit) consider Eskimo a slur.
Canadian Inuit (Innuinaq, Inuvialuit, and others) consider Eskimo a slur.
Alaskan Inuit (Iñupiat) do not consider Eskimo a slur.
Alaskan and Siberian Yupik people are not Inuit, and do not consider Eskimo a slur.
Also, the provided etymology is incorrect. There are a few different proposed etymologies for “Eskimo,” none of which are 100% agreed on, but “snow eater” is not one of them. The etymology most closely linked to the word’s slur status is “raw meat eater.” Other proposed etymologies are “snowshoe netter” or “speakers of a different language.”
tl;dr OP is correct that you should never use Eskimo to refer to Inuit in Canada and Greenland, but it is acceptable to use for Alaskan Inuit (Iñupiaq) people and for Yupik people. The safest all-encompassing term would be Inuit and Yupik (and Aleut, if applicable).
(If you are more familiar with Alaskan Native people than me and disagree with my sources, please do correct me. For now though, I believe this to be accurate.)
Good information. I knew Canadian Inuit didn’t like the term Eskimo, but I haven’t heard of the opinions of other Arctic people before.
hey guys friendly reminder from your fave Canadian that esk*mo is a slur so please don’t use it!
I see it usually in the context of “esk*mo kisses” which may pop up when people talk about their ships and their headcanon, but it means “snow eaters” in cree and is a slur against Inuit people so please just don’t use it!
and I would appreciate if u reblogged this because people outside Canada don’t seem to know this for the most part
Also if you want to refer to ‘‘eskimo kisses’‘ and not use that term the Inuit term for it is ‘‘kunik’‘. It’s a traditional greeting usually between relatives or a child and an adult, although it’s a little different from nose kisses so most Canadians call it ‘‘Inuit kiss’‘ and I’ve heard other people call it ‘‘bunny kisses’’. Either way there’s no excuse to use ‘‘eskimo’‘ in this context or another.
What’s really wild is that the native people literally told the Europeans “they walked” when asked how the statues were moved. The Europeans were like “lol these backwards heathens and their fairy tales guess it’s gonna always be a mystery!”
Maori told Europeans that kiore were native rats and no one believed them until DNA tests proved it
Roopkund Lake AKA “Skeleton Lake” in the Himalayas in India is eerie because it was discovered with hundreds of skeletal remains and for the life of them researchers couldn’t figure out what it was that killed them. For decades the “mystery” went unsolved.
Until they finally payed closer attention to local songs and legend that all essentially said “Yah the Goddess Nanda Devi got mad and sent huge heave stones down to kill them”. That was consistent with huge contusions found all on their neck and shoulders and the weather patterns of the area, which are prone to huge & inevitably deadly goddamn hailstones. https://www.facebook.com/atlasobscura/videos/10154065247212728/
Literally these legends were past down for over a thousand years and it still took researched 50 to “figure out” the “mystery”. 🙄
Adding to this, the Inuit communities in Nunavut KNEW where both the wrecks of the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were literally the entire time but Europeans/white people didn’t even bother consulting them about either ship until like…last year.
“Inuit traditional knowledge was critical to the discovery of both ships, she pointed out, offering the Canadian government a powerful demonstration of what can be achieved when Inuit voices are included in the process.
In contrast, the tragic fate of the 129 men on the Franklin expedition hints at the high cost of marginalising those who best know the area and its history.
“If Inuit had been consulted 200 years ago and asked for their traditional knowledge – this is our backyard – those two wrecks would have been found, lives would have been saved. I’m confident of that,” she said. “But they believed their civilization was superior and that was their undoing.”
“Oh yeah, I heard a lot of stories about Terror, the ships, but I guess Parks Canada don’t listen to people,” Kogvik said. “They just ignore Inuit stories about the Terror ship.”
Schimnowski said the crew had also heard stories about people on the land seeing the silhouette of a masted ship at sunset.
“The community knew about this for many, many years. It’s hard for people to stop and actually listen … especially people from the South.”
Indigenous Australians have had stories about giant kangaroos and wombats for thousands of years, and European settlers just kinda assumed they were myths. Cut to more recently when evidence of megafauna was discovered, giant versions of Australian animals that died out 41 000 years ago.
Similarly, scientists have been stumped about how native Palm trees got to a valley in the middle of Australia, and it wasn’t until a few years ago that someone did DNA testing and concluded that seeds had been carried there from the north around 30 000 years ago… aaand someone pointed out that Indigenous people have had stories about gods from the north carrying the seeds to a valley in the central desert.
it’s literally the oldest accurate oral history of the world.
Now consider this: most people consider the start of recorded history to be with the Sumerians and the Early Dynastic period of the Egyptians. So around 3500 BCE, or five and a half thousand years ago
These highly accurate Aboriginal oral histories originate from twenty thousand years ago at least
The aboriginal people of Australia have a history in the country that starts at least 30,000 years ago. Possibly as long as 60,000 years ago. They are believed to have been among the very the first diasporas out of Africa.
Just think about that. We’d been confined to a single continent for all of human history. And this group invented migration and sea-crossing and got to Australia. They probably went via Asia, but on the other hand there’s no genetic evidence for them spending any time in that continent.
It hardly seems plausible they just sailed from the Somali coat heading east across the vast India Ocean with their fingers crossed they’d hit land, hundreds of thousands of years before sea-going was even A Thing. But then the idea of this band going the long way round – across desert, mountain, sea and jungle; through Western Asia, then the entire India sub-continent and then hopping from island to island – hardly seems possible either.
Nevertheless, they made the journey.
No one survives that, and then goes on to thrive in Australia (which is well documented as being a hostile landscape even today) by luck. These were sophisticated people.
Aboriginal people know what they’re about. They saw the world before most people knew there was a word to see. If they say there were giant kangaroos, there were giant kangaroos.
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