page_title: Squaw
section_title: Derogatory and historical usage
hierarchical_section_title: Squaw / Derogatory and historical usage
caption_attribution_description: English: Ad for the American film Just Squaw (1919) with Beatriz Michelena and an unidentified actor, from color insert after page 746 of the May 10, 1919 Moving Picture World.
context_page_description: 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 offensive, derogatory, misogynist and racist.
  The English word is not used among Native American, First Nations, Inuit, or Métis peoples. While a similar morpheme is found within some longer words in some of the Eastern Algonquian languages, these languages only make up a small minority of the languages spoken in the hundreds of Indigenous communities affected by this slur. Even in Algonquian, the related word-fragments used are not the English-language slur, but small components of longer, Algonquian words that contain more than one morpheme. Eastern Algonquian morphemes meaning 'woman' which are found as components in other words and may have been transcribed into English include the Massachusett language squa and a number of other variants.
context_section_description: In most colonial texts squaw was used as general word for Indigenous women. It also became a derogatory adjective used against some men, in "squaw man," meaning either "a man who does woman's work" (similar to other languages) or "a white man married to an Indian woman and living with her people".
  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. 
  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". 
  LaDonna Harris (Comanche), when speaking 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.
caption: Advertisement for Just Squaw, a 1919 silent film.
exif: {"Image Artist": "Michael A. Dean", "Image ExifOffset": "2170", "Image XPAuthor": "Michael A. Dean", "Image Padding": "[]", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2014:09:03 20:08:54", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2014:09:03 20:08:54", "EXIF SubSecTimeOriginal": "68", "EXIF SubSecTimeDigitized": "68"}