The Redskin Fallacy

__"How Indians Got to Be Red" by Nancy Shoemaker, in The American Historical Review (June 1997), 400 A St. S.E., Washington, D.C. 20003.__

Many scholars today believe that Europeans invented the idea of race and imposed their notions of racial identity on others. But in at least one case, argues Shoemaker, a historian at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, a non-European group named itself.

That group is the Indians of North America. It has long been thought that they were labeled red by early European explorers—not because of their skin color, which the Europeans usually described as tawny or brown, but because they often daubed themselves with red paint. Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus made red a racial category in his Systema Naturae (1740).

But Shoemaker says that records of early meetings between Europeans and Indians show that the Indians had already taken the name red for themselves. In 1725, for example, a French priest in Mobile, Alabama, recounted a story told by a Taensas chief involving three men, one white, one black, and one red. The priest felt compelled to explain to his readers that the latter was an Indian, "for they call themselves in their language ‘Red Men.’ " In a 1726 transcript of an effort by the English to mediate a peace between the Creeks and Cherokees in South Carolina, the Indians referred to each other as "red people," while the English called them Indians.

Why did the Indians refer to themselves as red? Among some tribes of the Southeast, origin myths may have provided the inspiration. The Mesquakies of the lower Mississippi valley, for example, believed that the first humans were created out of clay "red as the reddest blood," one scholar wrote. The tribe’s name means "red Earths."

A second possibility is that Indians responded with red after the Europeans began calling themselves white. The first Europeans in the New World thought of themselves as Christians, but with the arrival of black slaves in the Carolinas in the early 18th century— some of them Christians—they began referring to themselves as white. Red was a natural response for the Indians, Shoemaker notes, because red and white already had strong paired symbolic meanings: red generally stood for war, white for peace. Some tribes may have borrowed the color red from tribes like the Mesquakies.

It is unclear if the Indians saw red and white as racial categories (i.e. biologically linked to social, political, and cultural characteristics) or only as the equivalent of "school colors." But whites in the 18th century did embrace race thinking. "It would take another century for the science of race to reach its full height and then one more century for the idea of race to be seriously questioned," writes Shoemaker. "Perhaps we are now at the brink of the apocalypse, when the idea of race will be abandoned entirely and another system of categories will emerge to take its place."