Abstract: The 'Squaw' entry from Handbook of American
Indians North of Mexico, edited by Frederick Webb Hodge (Smithsonian
Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 30. GPO: 1910.)
Author: Alexander F. Chamberlain of Clark University
Squaw. An Indian woman. From Narragenset squaw, probably an
abbreviation of eskwa, cognate with the Delaware ochquea, the
Chippewa ikwé, the Cree iskwew, etc. As a term for woman
squaw has been carried over the length and breadth of the United States
and Canada, and is even in use by Indians on the reservations of the W., who
have taken it from the whites. After the squaw have been named: Squawberry (the
partridge berry), squaw bush (in various parts of the country, Cornus
stolonifera, C. sericea, and C. canadensis), squaw carpet (a
California name of Ceanothus prostratus), squaw fish (a species of fish
found in the N. W.), squaw flower Trillium erectum, called also squaw
root), squaw man (an Indian who does woman's work; also a white man married to
an Indian woman and living with her people), squaw mint (the American
pennyroyal), squawroot (in different parts of the country, Trillium
erectum, the black and the blue cohosh, Conopholis americana, and
other plants), squaw sachem a term in vogue in the era of New England
colonization for a female chief among the Indians), squaw vine (a New England
name for the partridge berry), squawweed (Erigeron philadelphicum and
Senecio aureus), squaw winter (a term in use in parts of the Canadian N.
W. to designate a mild beginning of winter). A species of duck (Harelda
glacialis) is called old squaw. (A. F. C.)
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