More Raw Meat for Editors

I trust you no longer use the offensive term “Eskimo”? A recent poster on the League of Canadian Poets’ email list was taken to task for doing so. As every Canadian schoolchild knows, “Eskimo” is an offensive term in a neighbouring language meaning “eater of raw meat.” “Inuit” is the correct term.

Except that it is not so. This is apparently a false etymology, embraced to cultivate a sense of victimhood, on the one hand, and of expertise, on the other.

The first problem is that, if it really means “eater of raw meat,” it is hard to see how it was intended as pejorative. The neighbouring native groups from which the term is supposed to have come, the Algonkians and specifically the Montagnais, also eat raw meat.

Etymologists have also pointed out the awkward fact that the word for “eater of raw meat” in Montagnais is quite different from “eskimo.”

More likely, the original word that has become the English “Eskimo” meant “speaker of a different language,” or “the snowshoe people” (this latter with the broad intended meaning, “northern people”).

Moreover, there are real problems with the proposed term “Inuit.” First off, it is an Inuktitut word. Not all Eskimos speak Inuktitut. It does not mean anything in the Yupik language. Yupik speakers (in Alaska) therefore prefer the term “Eskimo,” and find “Inuit” offensive.

Worse, the actual meaning of “Inuit” is “people.” In other words, to call a specific ethnic group “Inuit” is to necessarily imply that all other ethnicities are not human.

If calling someone an eater of raw meat is offensive, is it better to call them non-human?