Understanding the Term 'Eskimo'

SPEAKER: So, one of the biggest questions that people ask when we're referring to Alaska Natives are "Who are Eskimos?"

and this is a question that comes up quite a bit.

My name is Aaron Leggett, I'm currently the president of the Native Village of Eklutna.

The Native Village of Eklutna is the only federally and now state-recognized tribe here within the Municipality of Anchorage Eskimo is a term that was referring to people that lived around the North Coastal Parts of Alaska, Canada, and Greenland, so they encompass the Yu'pik, Cu'pik the St. Lawrence Island or Siberian Yu'pik, the Inupiaq, and the Inuit of Canada Labrador and Greenland so it's a very large Geographic term It's not descriptive of any one Alaska Native culture or even into Canada so it's it's taken on sort of a pejorative term certainly in probably the last... oh, 40 to 50 years.

There there's two different theories of what the name translates it comes from French through I believe the Cree language and it's either "eaters of raw meat" or having to do with the webbing of snowshoes, but this term got picked up in the early 20th century, the first what's considered to be proto-documentary "Nanook of the North" Robert Flaherty really kind of set the stage for a lot of these stereotypes of what the Northern people's life looked like, that they had igloos, ice snow shelters, that they ate all their food raw, there's hundreds of different caricatures--Eskimo kisses--I think there's just this mostly through Hollywood and Madison Avenue, you know the the caricature of the happy-go-lucky Eskimo with his little dog following behind him rubbing noses paints a very distorted picture it's not unlike the way uh when people think of Native Americans in the lower 48 they think that all Native people slept in teepees and they hunted Buffalo and rode horses and so, you know, certain terms that were used in the past are are highly discouraged now certainly there are older Alaska Native people in some communities that are completely fine with that term but what you'll find more often is somebody might say I'm Yu'pik Eskimo or I'm Inupiaq Eskimo or we're the real Eskimos because we're Inupiaq, but I know in Canada it's it's highly discouraged and in Alaska it's certainly frowned upon We're moving away from these really broad geographic terms that were applied onto the people they weren't actually words that were used by the people themselves in their own languages.