gung ho

Women spinning thread underneath a sign with the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives “gung ho” logo, c. 1940

3 December 2020

The oft-told tale is that U.S. Marine Lieutenant Colonel Evans Carlson introduced the phrase gung-ho, meaning enthusiastic, eager, into the English language. The story has a germ of truth in that Carlson did a lot to popularize the phrase and associate it with the military, but he did not introduce the phrase into English, and it had a degree of currency among English speakers before he came along.

Gung-ho comes from the Mandarin 工合 or gōnghé. It is a clipping of the name of the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives, 工業合作社 or Gōngyè Hézuòshè, which was a movement started in 1937 in Shanghai to develop grassroots industry in China in response to the Japanese invasion. The idea was to mobilize small groups of displaced and unemployed workers under a framework of a larger infrastructure.

The phrase in this context first appeared in English-language newspapers in 1939. From the Washington, D.C. Sunday Star of 19 November 1939:

A red blunted triangle inscribed with the white character “Kung Ho,” meaning “We Work Together,” is the insignia of these Chinese industrials. It appears upon the some 50 products they turn out.

The gung-ho spelling appeared in a 19 February 1941 article in the daily version of the same paper:

If Wendell Willkie carries out his reported plans to visit China in pursuance of his zest for personal observation of conditions in a war-torn world, it’s believed that study of China’s so-call “guerilla industry” would be one of the magnets drawing him thither. It is the great Chines industrial co-operative scheme known as Gung-ho, which means “work together.”

And Helen Foster Snow, under the pseudonym Nym Wales, one of the expatriates who helped organize the C.I.C. movement, penned a 1941 book on the topic, in which she gives the origin of the phrase:

In Chinese the term is Chung Kuo Kung Yeh Ho Tso Hsieh Hui—Chinese Industrial Cooperative Association. It is popularly called “Kung Ho” or “Gung Ho” from the two characters meaning “Work Together,” which appear in its triangle trademark. In English is it referred to as the “C.I.C. Movement.”

Later in the book, she describes the movement’s popularity:

Again one who had been a child worker at the age of ten, and had had twenty years of city factory life, with its strikes, its long hours, its trickery and so on. And how much the C.I.C. meant to him and his whole co-op. He has made a “Kung Ho” in grass outside his co-op ... An ex-school teacher from occupied territory, and an ex-Red Cross man with famine work experience, and now chairman of a surgical gauze co-op. And so-on—they were an encouraging crowd.

“It was fun to pass a lone kid, doing his morning job by a grave mound, and singing lustily the co-op song, while he tied up the tapes around him—“All for One and One for All.”

“I have just come in after having an afternoon with Miss Jen— looking at some of her women's work. It is really good. We passed a bunch of six-year olds marching down the loess valley road from the school which was housed in a temple vacated by the soldiers because they wanted to help “kung ho.” The kids were singing “Ch'i Lai" in good kung-ho fashion.”

There was a newsreel about the C.I.C. movement in China that was shown in U.S. movie theaters, as evidenced by a 13 September 1941 advertisement in the San Francisco Examiner:

“Gung Ho”
(In Chinese “Work Together”)
With Regan “Tex” McCrary”

1941 advertisement for a New Jersey bank that uses “Gung Ho” as a slogan

And a Plainfield, New Jersey bank even used gung-ho in a 20 September 1941 advertisement:

工合 ... Pronounced “Gung ho!”
It is the slogan that’s inspiring all China today.
It means, “Work together”
It’s a good slogan for America.

Here is where Carlson and the marines come in. Before the United States’ entry into WWII, Carlson had served several tours of duty in China, including one as a military observer to the Chinese army in its fight against the Japanese. His duties in this post included assessing Chinese industrial capacity, which is where he became familiar with and enamored by the C.I.C. movement. In February 1942, he was placed in command of the newly formed Second Marine Raider Battalion, a special operations or commando unit. He chose gung-ho as the unit’s motto.

On 17 August 1942, the Second Raider Battalion raided the island of Butaritari, known to the Americans as Makin Atoll, in the Gilbert Islands, and the action and Carlson’s unit received considerable press coverage over the following weeks. (The unit’s P.R. angle was helped by the fact that James Roosevelt, the president’s son, was Carlson’s executive officer.) For instance, this Associated Press piece appeared on 28 August 1942:

Colonel Carlson explained that in organizing the battalion he preached an old Chinese saying “Kung Ho,” which means “Work and Harmony.” This became the byword of the battalion.

And this International News Service piece on 8 September 1942:

“‘Gung Ho’ Battle Cry of Carlson Raiders.
WASHINGTON, Sept. 7 (INS)—The new battle cry of “Carlson’s Raiders,” who besieged the Japanese base on Makin island August 17, today is ‘Gung Ho,’ or in English, ‘Work Together.’”

There was even a 1943 Hollywood movie, starring Randolph Scott, made about the raid and titled Gung Ho!

As a result, gung ho was catapulted from a term that was somewhat familiar to some English speakers to one that was known by all, and the term’s focus and ethos also shifted from industry to the military.

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Sources:

Associated Press. “Marines’ Island Raid Hit Japs Hard Blow.” Commercial Appeal (Memphis, Tennessee), 28 August 1942, 3. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Evans, Jessie Fant. “China’s Co-operatives Form a New Wall, Visitor Says.” Sunday Star (Washington, DC), 19 November 1939, C-10. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. gung-ho, adj.

International News Service. “‘Gung Ho’ Battle Cry of Carlson Raiders.” Times-Union (Albany, New York). 8 September 1942, 6. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Newsreel Theater” (advertisement). Sacramento Bee, 7 March 1942, 15. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. gung ho, n.

Plainfield National Bank (advertisement). Plainfield Courier-News (New Jersey), 20 September 1941, 18. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Snow, Helen Foster (as Nym Wales). China Builds for Democracy: A Story of Cooperative Industry. New York: Modern Age Books, 1941, 43, 72. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Telenews (advertisement). San Francisco Examiner, 13 September 1941, 28. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Wile, Frederic William. “Washington Observations.” Evening Star (Washington, DC), 19 February 1941, A-13. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Photo credits: unknown photographer, 1940s, Spinning thread, China. Alley, Rewi, 1897-1987: Photographs. Ref: PA1-o-899-04-3. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand; Plainfield National Bank (advertisement). Plainfield Courier-News (New Jersey), 20 September 1941, 18. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

gun

Mons Meg, a fifteenth-century, 510mm (20 inches) bombard housed at Edinburgh Castle

2 December 2020

While we don’t know the origin with absolute certainty, the word gun appears to come from the woman’s name Gunnhildr, which is a compound of two Old Norse words, gunnr and hildr, which both mean war. Giving a weapon a woman’s name is hardly an unusual practice. Two famous examples are the fifteenth-century bombard in Edinburgh Castle known as Mons Meg (it was made in Mons in what is now Belgium) and the 420mm German WWI howitzer dubbed Big Bertha by Allied soldiers.

The word dates to the fourteenth century. From an inventory of munitions at Windsor Castle conducted in 1330–31:

Una magna balista de cornu quæ vocatur Domina Gunilda.

(A great ballista of horn which is called Lady Gunilda.)

A ballista is essentially a giant crossbow. So, in early use, gun would appear to refer to any kind of siege engine. But only a few years later an inventory of the Guildhall of London in September 1339 uses guns to refer to gunpowder cannons:

Item, in Camera Gildaulæ sunt sex Instrumenta de latone, vocitata Gonnes, et quinque roleres ad eadem. Item, peletæ de plumbo pro eisdem Instrumentis, quæ ponderant iiiie libræ et dimidium. Item, xxxii libræ de pulvere pro dictis Instrumentis.

(Item, in a room of the Guildhall are six instruments of brass, called guns, and five wheels of the same. Item, balls of lead for the same instruments, which weighing four hundredweight and a half pounds. Item, thirty-two pounds of powder for these instruments.)

Although these early appearances are in Latin texts, the word gun does not appear to be native Latin, but rather represents an English word. Note that both texts say the devices are “called” guns; they don’t say they “are” guns. This use of vocare is typical when the word is being glossed in another language.

Outside of the context of inventories, we see the word appear in the romance Sir Ferumbras, c. 1380. The text here makes a distinction between guns and ballistas or crossbows:

Þat wanne þe frensche þyderward; caste stones oþer tre,
Þay scholde with hure scheldes hard; kepe þe dent aȝe;
& summe scholde schete to þe frencshe rout; with gunnes & boȝes of brake,
Þat þay ne beo hardy to lokie out; defense aȝen hem to make.
And on þat oþer stage amidde; ordeynt he gunnes grete,
And oþer engyns y-hidde; wilde fyr to cast & schete.

(That when the French cast stones or trees in that direction,
They should with their hard shields keep the blows back;
& some would shoot, to the woe of the French, with guns and crossbows,
So that they would not be so valiant as to look out; making a defense against them.
And in that middle tier; he prepared the great guns,
And other hidden engines, to cast & shoot wildfire.)

The he in the penultimate line refers to the French engineer in charge of the siege. I have translated boȝes of brake as crossbows; literally it reads “bows of the crank.” It’s unclear whether the poet here meant guns to refer to gunpowder cannons or some other type of siege engine, but he may have meant cannons. Gunpowder cannons appeared in China c.1000 C.E. and in Europe in the fourteenth century. Geoffrey Chaucer’s House of Fame, written at about the same time, c.1378–80, makes mention of early gunpowder weapons:

That thrughout every regioun
Wente this foule trumpes soun,
As swifte as pelet out of gonne,
Whan fyr is in the poudre ronne.
And swiche a smoke gan out-wende
Out of his foule trumpes ende,
Blak, bloo, grenyssh, swartish reed,
As doth where that men melte leed,
Loo, al on high fro the tuel.

(So that throughout every region
Went this foul trumpet’s sound,
As swift as a pellet out of a gun,
When fire is in the powder run.
And such a smoke began to wend
Out of his foul trumpet’s end,
Black, blue, greenish, darkest red,
As does where men melt lead,
Lo, all on high from the chimney.)

Overtime, the non-firearm senses of gun dropped away, and the word came to be used to refer to a firearm of any caliber. Although, in my Army training I learned a more restrictive technical definition. According to this definition, a gun is large-caliber, high-velocity weapon with a flat trajectory, such as on a tank or a naval ship. Howitzers, which are large caliber but with relatively low muzzle velocities and arcing trajectories, and rifles and pistols, which are small caliber (i.e., small arms), are not guns. But this technical definition is not generally observed.

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Sources:

Chaucer, Geoffrey. House of Fame. The Riverside Chaucer, third edition. Larry D. Benson, ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, lines 1641–49, 367.

Herrtage, Sidney J., ed. The English Charlemagne Romances, Part I: Sir Ferumbras. Early English Text Society, Extra Series 34. London: Oxford UP, 1879, lines 3261–66, 103. HathiTrust Digital Archive. (Oxford, Bodleian MS Ashmole 33).

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. gonne, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, gun, n.

Riley, Henry Thomas, ed. Memorials of London and London Life. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1868, 205. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Photo Credit: Wikimedia, 2008.

Guinea

A 1663 guinea coin with the head of Charles II above a small elephant on the obverse and the shields of the four countries of the United Kingdom on the reverse

1 December 2020

Guinea is a word with many seemingly unrelated senses but which are actually connected. It can refer to one of several countries in Africa, a sum of British money equaling £1.05, or it can be a derogatory name for an Italian American.

The word first appears as a European name for the west coast of Africa. The name’s origin unknown, but it appears first in Portuguese as Guiné. This toponymic use survives today in the names of the countries of Guinea, Equatorial Guinea, and Guinea-Bissau. Guinea makes its English language appearance in a 1555 translation of Pietro Martire Anghiera’s The Decades of the New Worlde:

The thyrde day of October abowt mydnyght, the capytayne commaunded theym to lyght fyrebrandes and to hoyse vp theyr sayles directynge theyr course towarde the South, saylynge betwene Capo Verde of Affryke and the Ilandes lyinge abowt the same, beinge from the Equinoctiall .xiiii. degrees and a halfe. They sayled thus, manye dayes in the syght of the coaste of Guinea, of Ethiope, where is the mountayne cauled Serra Liona beinge .viii. degrees aboue the Equinoctiall.

Guinea quickly became an adjective referring to anything from or having to do with Africa. A Guinea-man, for instance, was a ship that conducted trade, in slaves as well as in other cargo, with Africa. And in British North America, guinea came to denote a slave from Africa, as opposed to one born in the Americas. From an 18 April 1745 Boston newspaper:

That three Privateers belonging to New York, commanded by Capts. Langdon, Morgan and Jeffries, had brought in a Sloop to New Providence, which they took on the Spanish Main (deserted by all the Men except a Dutch Man and 4 Guinea Negroes,) on board of which they have found between 50 and 60,000 Dollars.

And by the early nineteenth century, Guinea was functioning as a noun referring to any Black person. From James Fenimore Cooper’s 1823 The Pioneers:

But damn the bit of manners has the fellow any more than if he was one of them Guineas, down in the kitchen there.

And it continued to refer to Black and mixed-race people well into the twentieth century. For instance, a particular group of mixed race people in and around Barbour County, West Virginia went by that name. From Hu Maxwell’s 1899 history of that county, which reflects the racist attitudes that others held about them:

There is a clan of partly-colored people in Barbour County often called “Guineas,” under the erroneous presumption that they are Guinea negroes. They vary in color from white to black, often have blue eyes and straight hair, and they are generally industrious. Their number in Barbour is estimated at one thousand.

But in the late nineteenth century, Guinea came to be used as a derogatory name for Italian-Americans, and eventually other ethnicities from the Mediterranean region. Exactly why is unknown. It may be because many people from the Mediterranean have darker complexions than those typical of northern Europeans, or it may have been an epithet pointing to their place on the social ladder alongside Blacks. This appearance in the New York Tribune of 17 July 1882 shows that early use may have specifically been in reference to those born in Italy, as opposed to Italian-Americans born in North America, before expanding to include all Italian-Americans, an expansion that parallels the term’s expansion from those born in Africa to eventually include all Black people:

The “hoodlum” of New-York, with his senses deadened to the beauty of the Latin tongue and mellow Neapolitan accent, has bestowed upon the races that use it with volubility the names of “Guineas” and “Dagoes.”
[...]
The chances are strongly in favor of their receiving a shower of stones on the way, from the ragged gamins in the street, who cry out at every fresh arrival of Guineas. But they are soon with their countrymen, and when they see on every side Italian signs over the doorways and swart Italian faces peering out the windows, they feel themselves perfectly at home.

That leaves us with how guinea came to be associated with British currency. In 1663, the Royal Mint began issuing a gold coin, nominally worth 20 shillings, for use by the Company of Royal Adventurers of England trading with Africa. As with other things associated with Africa, the coin quickly acquired the name guinea. From Samuel Pepys diary of 29 October 1666:

And so to my goldsmith to bid him look out for some gold for me; and he tells me that Ginnys, which I bought 2000 of not long ago, and cost me but 18½d change, will now cost me 22d, and but very few to be had at any price.

The sums that Pepys refers to are the fees charged by the goldsmith for converting silver into gold. The coin fluctuated in value, eventually ending up with a nominal value of 21 shillings before it stopped being issued in 1813. But the name guinea survived, mainly in specialty applications like gambling on horse racing, in the sense of 21 shillings, or in today’s decimal currency, £1.05.

So, that’s it. While the different senses seem, on the surface, to be unrelated, they all go back to Africa.

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Sources:

Anghiera, Pietro Martire. The Decades of the New Worlde. Richard Eden, trans. London: Guilhelmi Powell for Edwarde Sutton, 1555, 217r–v. Early English Books Online (EEBO)

The Boston Weekly News-Letter, 18 April 1745, 2. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Cooper, James Fenimore. The Pioneers, vol. 3 of 3. London: John Murray, 1823, 106. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Dictionary of American Regional English, 2013, s.v. Guinea, n.1.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. guinea, n.1.

“The Italian Quarter.” The New York Tribune, 17 July 1882, 8. NewsBank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Maxwell, Hu. The History of Barbour County, West Virginia (1899). Parsons, West Virginia: McClain Printing, 1968, 310. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. Guinea, n.

Pepys, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, vol. 7 of 10. Robert Latham and William Matthews, eds. Berkeley: U of California Press, 1972, 346. HathTrust Digital Archive.

Photo credit: Sovereign Rarities, Vcoins.com.

squire / esquire

30 November 2020

The words squire and esquire come into English from the Anglo-Norman esquier, which in turn comes from the Latin scutarius, or shield bearer, from scutum, shield.

Squire appears in English by the early thirteenth century in the sense of a boy or young man who attends a knight or nobleman. Such squires were often in training to be knights themselves. From the romance King Horn, composed c. 1225. It survives in several manuscripts, and the following is taken from one that was copied c. 1300:

“Go nu,” quaþ heo, “sone
& send him after none,

Whane þe kyng arise,
On a squieres wise,
To wude for to pleie:
Nis non þat him biwreie.”

(“Go now,” said she, “soon
& send him after noon,

Dressed as a squire,
When the king arises,
to the woods for sport,
No one will betray him.)

Squire appears as verb meaning to escort a person, especially to escort a woman, by the late fourteenth century. From Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, written c. 1386:

And yet of oure apprentice Janekyn,
For his crispe heer, shynynge as gold so fyn,
And for he squiereth me bothe up and doun,
Yet hastow caught a fals suspecioun.

(And yet of our apprentice Janekyn,
Because of his curly hair, shining as gold so fine,
And because he squires me both up and down,
Yet has caught a false suspicion.)

The verb isn’t recorded again until the late sixteenth century, but it was probably in use much earlier.

The form esquire is a somewhat later borrowing from the Anglo-Norman. A 1374 Latin document makes a reference to “Willielmus Gray, esquier.” And the following appears in a document written in English found in the Proceedings of the Privy Council of England from 1419:

ther wer sende us with our prive seal viij. oþ[er] blanche not endosyd but þat we shulde endoce hem to suche knyghtis and esquiers as us thoght able þe whcihe prive seals we have endosid and sent forþ to dyv[er]s p[er]sones gyvyng hem a day when þat they shulde come and trete with us

(There were sent to us with our personal seal eight others that were blank and not endorsed, so that we should endorse them to such knights and esquires as we thought able, which personal seals we have endorsed and sent forth to diverse persons giving them a day when they should come and treat with us)

Over time, esquire generalized in meaning to refer to any gentleman, not necessarily a servant of a knight.

In American speech, esquire is rarely used, with one major exception—lawyers, who often append the title to their name. There is no legal significance to the title, and anyone is allowed to style themselves as esquire, as in Bill S. Preston, Esq. Although non-lawyers almost never do. (Which is why the Bill S. Preston, Esq. joke is funny.)

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2015, s.v. esquier.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue.” The Canterbury Tales. In the Riverside Chaucer, Larry D. Benson, ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987, lines 3.303–06, 109.

Hall, Joseph, ed. King Horn: A Middle-English Romance. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901, lines 359–62, 21. HathiTrust Digital Archive. (Cambridge, University Library Gg.4.27, Part 2).

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. squier, n., squieren, v., esquier, n.

Nicolas, Harris, ed. Proceedings of the Privy Council of England, vol. 2 of 6. London: Commissioners on the Public Records, 1834, 247. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. esquire, n.1, squire, n., squire, v.

“De protectionibus, pro personis qui cum Edmundo comite Cantebrigiæ, profecturi sunt.” (1374). Foedera, conventiones, litterae, et cujuscunque generis acta publica, vol 3, part 2, of 3 vols. Thomas Rymer, ed. London: 1830, 1012. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

indigenous

Chiricahua Apache children at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, Pennsylvania, c. March 1887, an example of forced assimilation into settler-colonist culture

25 November 2020

The word indigenous, at least as it is used to refer to people, has been undergoing a subtle shift in meaning in the last half century or so, a shift that the major dictionaries have not yet caught up with. The word is from the Late Latin indigenus, meaning native to, born in. In its earliest English uses, the word was used as in the Latin. And when referring to plants, animals, and geology, indigenous still means precisely that, native to the region in question.

The earliest English-language use of the word that I’m aware of actually refers to people in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England. Michael Stanhope’s 1632 Cures Without Care is a book about the mineral waters near Knaresborough, Yorkshire, and it uses the phrase indigenous poor people to refer to those born into poverty:

Those who neighbour nearest to these waters, are an indigenous poore people, not able to step out of the roade of their laborious calling, being plaine husbandmen and cottagers, and therefore it cannot be expected they should accommodate them in their many usefull concernments wherein they are most grossely defective.

And a decade or so later, indigenous is used in the context of colonialism. From Thomas Browne’s 1646 Pseudodoxia epidemica:

In many parts thereof it be confessed there bee at present swarmes of Negroes serving under the Spaniard, yet were they all transported from Africa, since the discovery of Columbus, and are not indigenous or proper natives of America.

But it was not exclusively used in the context of colonialism. As late as 1782, Europeans could be referred to as indigenous. From a tract by Samuel Musgrave of that year:

Upon the whole, therefore, we have best reason to conclude, first, that the Greeks in general were an indigenous people, αὐτόχθουες: and, secondly, that their RELIGION and MYTHOLOGY was radically, if not entirely, their own.

The Greek autochthonous is synonymous with indigenous in meaning native to a region, although in current English-language use autochthonous is not generally used to refer to people.

But indigeneity was increasingly tied to race and decreasingly associated with European peoples. In 1790, Bruce James writes of the people of East Africa:

The Ethiopians, who nearly surround Abyssinia are blacker than those of Gingiro, their country hotter, and are like them, an indigenous people that have been, from the beginning, in the same part where they now inhabit.

And by the middle of the twentieth century, indigenous was inextricably contrasted to White settler colonists. For instance, in their 1962 White Settlers in Tropical Africa Lewis Gann and Peter Duignan write of Victorian attitudes to toward Africans, distinguishing the indigenous Blacks from the settler-colonist Whites. Duigan uses indigenous Africans to distinguish from White African settler-colonists in Africa, some of whose families had lived in Africa for centuries:

The indigenous Africans, Europe’s “external proletariat,” were looked upon as being even more licentious and improvident than her “internal proletariat,” the unskilled workers of Manchester, Lille, and Essen; for most Victorians, this was saying a great deal.

And writing in French about the same time in his 1961 Les Damnés de la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth), Frantz Fanon contrasts indigènes with européennes:

Le monde colonial est un monde compartimenté. Sans doute est-il superflu, sur le plan de la description, de rappeler l'existence de villes indigènes et de villes européennes, d'écoles pour indigènes et d'écoles pour Européens, comme il est superflu de rappeler l’apartheid en Afrique du Sud.

But starting in the 1970s, Indigenous peoples began to organize on a global scale and resisted these earlier senses of indigenous as applied to people that were imposed by a framework established by settler colonists. As an example, a 2004 translation of Fanon’s book into English by Richard Philcox does not use indigenous to translate indigènes, instead using native in quotation marks:

The colonial world is a compartmentalized world. It is obviously as superfluous to recall the existence of "native" towns and European towns, of schools for "natives" and schools for Europeans, as it is to recall apartheid in South Africa.

Clearly, something had shifted between 1961 and 2004 and indigenous, at least in North American English, no longer simply meant native to a region. Indigeneity no longer was a simple contrast of race or ethnicity. In 2016 J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, a professor of Anthropology and American Studies at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, writes:

On the flip side, in asserting indigeneity as a category of analysis, the question of its substance always arises. Just as critical race studies scholars insist that race is a useful category that is a distinct social formation rather than a derivative category emerging from class and/or ethnicity, indigeneity is a category of analysis that is distinct from race, ethnicity, and nationality—even as it entails elements of all three of these.

The First Nations Studies Program at the University of British Columbia gives the following definition of indigenous:

The United Nations generally identifies Indigenous groups as autonomous and self-sustaining societies that have faced discrimination, marginalization and assimilation of their cultures and peoples due to the arrival of a larger or more dominant settler population. The word Indigenous was adopted by Aboriginal leaders in the 1970s after the emergence of Indigenous rights movements around the world as a way to identify and unite their communities and represent them in political arenas such as the United Nations. Indigenous was chosen over other terms that leaders felt reflected particular histories and power dynamics, or had been imposed by the colonizers. Given the diversity of Indigenous experience, no universally accepted definition has been drafted.

Indigeneity, because it arises out of a contrast with settler colonists, cannot be separated from the contexts of oppression, marginalization, and forced assimilation in which it has always existed. When it is applied to people, therefore, it means much more than simply native to a region.

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Sources:

Browne, Thomas. Pseudodoxia epidemica. London: T.H. for E. Dod, 1646, 325. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Bruce, James. An Interesting Narrative of the Travels of James Bruce, Esq. into Abyssinia. Samuel Shaw, ed. London: 1790, 107. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Fanon, Frantz. Les Damnés de la Terre (1961). Paris: La Découvete, 2002, 41.

———. The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Richard Philcox, trans. New York: Grove Press, 2004, 149. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Gann, Lewis H. and Peter Duignan. White Settlers in Tropical Africa. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1962, 9. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Kauanui, J. Kēhaulani. “‘A Structure, Not an Event.’: Settler Colonialism and Enduring Indigeneity.” Lateral, 5.1, Spring 2016.

Musgrave, Samuel. Two Dissertations. London: J. Nichols, 1782, 17. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. indigenous, adj.; third edition, June 2011, s.v. autochthonous, adj.

Stanhope, Michael. Cures Without Care. London: William Jones, 1632, 26. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

University of British Columbia, First Nations Studies Program. “Global Actions.”

Photo credit: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, public domain image.