Don't let your Huskies...

[huskies679]

phoenix-

the link you have posted is a racist organization isn't it? i have never heard of them.

i do have a question for somebody that knows something about native americans. this conversation came up last night AGAIN, but wasn't the word sioux (or snake) an insult for somebody that is lakotah(sp)?

[sioux fan in phoenix]

phoenix-

the link you have posted is a racist organization isn't it? i have never heard of them.

What are you babbling about anyway? If you took the time to read through that site you'd plainly see that it's a call to our government to enforce our immigration laws. There's nothing racist about demanding that our federal gov't clamp down on illegal immigration.

[Corella]

Kind of like your institution looks for trying to rationalize the whole Native American mascot situation.

Kind of like your institution looks for having an alcoholic and uncontrolable spouse abuser as the head of the athletic department.

[MinnesotaNorthStar]

Kind of like your institution looks for having an alcoholic and uncontrolable spouse abuser as the head of the athletic department.

BUUUUUURRRNNNN

Imagine that Huskies679...enforce our laws...what's this country coming to?

[Goon]

My first trip to Grand Forks to watch the jacks and UND play basketball. It was pretty entertaining to see the great lengths the UND administration is going to insure they show respect for the Native American Culture. The monolgue before each game about sportsmanship and respect and than the dance at halftime. The ultimate respect would be to just drop the name. You look so silly trying to suck up that is comes across as anything but sincere but rather a ploy to do and say whatever it takes to retain the Sioux Logo.

Trolling along...

[Smoggy]

i do have a question for somebody that knows something about native americans. this conversation came up last night AGAIN, but wasn't the word sioux (or snake) an insult for somebody that is lakotah(sp)?

This is what I've heard (if I remember):

Sioux is what the French fur traders called them. Whether it was them saying it or the French calling them it. Remember, that their are different tribes of Sioux and one might have called the other by that name. I believe it means "snake in the grass," but that might be just in one dialect. It's hard to know.

Facts are they used/use the name and they've been known by it for over a hundred years. Really they could just say it means something else, since there are probably very few that know the language.

This whole name thing is frustrating. It's frustrating, because people try telling us how to act when they have no clue about what's been done. Jackguy, there have been pow-wows that the athletes attend and a lot of us have learned things about the culture that would never happen otherwise.

I've studied the issue for some time (though not to the extent of PCM). I've taken classes and talked to the people that want to lose the name. They've never convinced me that it caused harm. The main people that want it changed is a small political group of white people.

My girlfriend's family is Native American (her grandpa was 100%). I don't believe they are Sioux, but they don't have a problem with Native American names. Lets also remember that last year the Sioux hockey team had a goalie of Sioux blood and he said it was a dream come true and that he wore the jersey with pride.

[PCM]

Although conventional wisdom holds that the word "Sioux" means "snake" and was intended as an insult, not everyone agrees with that. Here's an excerpt from a letter to the editor by Larry Stammen of the UND Alumni Association that was printed in the Feb. 18, 1999, Grand Forks Herald.

I think everyone will be interested to learn that the name Sioux,which some American Indian students have claimed is derogatory in its origin and means snake, is a tribal name only. It actually means speaker of a foreign language, and its usage in the English language has never been taken as insulting.

The source of my information is Ives Goddard, curator and head of the ethnology division in the Department of Anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History, which is part of the Smithsonian Institution. Goddard is a specialist in Algonquian languages. He is the linguistics editor and technical editor of the Handbook of North American Indians.

The name Sioux has been rejected by some because it allegedly means `snake,' Goddard writes. In the first place, Sioux is meaningless in any Indian language since it is a French shortening of earlier Nadouessioux. This is a Gallicization, with the substitution of the French plural -x for the Ojibwa plural -ak, or an earlier Nadouessiouak, a direct borrowing from Ojibwa na-towe-ssiwak. This Ojibwa word (specifically from the Ottawa dialect) is only used as a tribal name, never as a word for snake, but it is derived from another ethnonym, na-towe, `speak a foreign language.' By the most likely analysis, the Proto-Algonquian word na-towe-wa would mean etmologically, `speaker of a foreign language.'

John Koontz, a linguist and leading authority on Siouan Languages at the University of Colorado, confirms Goddard's conclusions. Nadouessioux and similar French spellings representing Ojibwa Nadouessiouak are the source of the word Sioux as an English term for the various Dakota people and embodies no insulting implication. As far as I know, there is no trace of the terms Sioux or Nadouessioux being taken as insulting in either French or English usage, ever.