In Denmark, a glacier renamed one of its ice creams, called "Eskimo", because the name was deemed offensive to the Inuit people, meaning "eater of raw meat" according to AFP. "It has become clear to us that the people believe that the Eskimo name reminds them of a past of humiliation and unfair treatment," writes the century-old brand Hansens Is on its Facebook page. She adds: "After careful consideration, we decided to give our iced stick a new, more appropriate name".
The announcement was immediately accompanied by a flood of negative reactions, such as "we can't say anything anymore", on the one hand. "We are there," laments a journalist. "Where will debility end? “, Criticizes a surfer. "I admit my inexpressible shame tonight for having eaten avocado without the slightest awareness of the offense done to my person", laughs at the lawyer and columnist at Figaro William Goldnadel.
Other people, on the contrary, were indignant at the “racism” of the appellation. All this is more complicated, as we explain to you.
An ancient controversy
It is not the first time that the word Eskimo has been controversial. According to the Inuit language specialist and researcher at INALCO Marc-Antoine Mahieu, this debate has been growing for about 20 years. Recently, a Canadian hockey team, The Edmonton Eskimos, has announced that it is likely to change its name, and is currently considering this. The very serious Merriam Webster dictionary also specifies that it is a word "sometimes offensive".
One of the reasons given is the perceived meaning of the word, which is said and repeated, for example on Wikipedia, that it means "eater of raw meat". This was also explained by Aaja Chemnitz Larsen, one of the two deputies representing Greenland in the Danish Parliament.
"Speaker of a foreign language"
"From a scientific point of view, it is extremely unlikely that this word means to eat raw meat," says Marc-Antoine Mahieu. According to the linguist, the most solid hypothesis comes from a linguist who had demonstrated that it meant "speaker of a foreign language". Another hypothesis is that it would mean "snowshoe maker". Nothing necessarily very offensive.
Another erroneous explanation comes from the fact that many imagine that the word "Eskimo" was given by the white colonizer to the Inuit, in a derogatory way. Again, this is false, explains Marc-Antoine Mahieu The term comes from the Algonquian languages, a family of languages spoken in North America by Native Americans who settled well before the formation of the United States and Canada. In other words: it does not come from Indo-European languages, and not from whites.
Exonym
The fact remains that we can understand that a people want to use their words to designate it. Even if "Eskimo" is not the word of the colonizers, it is an "exonym", that is to say, as Robert defines it, a name "used in a given language to designate a place or a group of people who call themselves otherwise in their original language ”.
In Greenland, Greenlanders generally prefer to be called by the word which in their language designates Greenlanders, ie "kalaallit", explains Marc-Antoine Mahieu (even if in Alaska this word has a certain use to designate the Inuit and peoples related to the Inuit, such as the Yupiks, by avoiding calling them all "Inuit", adds the researcher). As in Lapland, the "Lapps" prefer to be designated by the name they have given themselves, "Samis" or "Sami". Could we still speak of Indochina instead of Vietnam?
A summer in 1922…
But how, in fact, did the Eskimos designate ice cream? Here the story is to look for in the history of cinema, and of the film Nanook of the North , or Nanouk l'Esquimau in French , by the United States Robert Flaherty. The film was a colossal success in its time, in the summer of 1922. So much so that it inspired the ice-cream merchants, well established in cinemas. In Germany the ice creams were called "Nanouks", in France "Eskimos".
If the debate is today very widely known across the Atlantic, it is much less known in France, where all this seems to many a little distant. And Marc-Antoine Mahieu concludes: “In Canada we get murdered when we talk about Eskimos in public debate. In France we are a little behind. "
World
Denmark: High-end glacier renounces the name "Eskimo", deemed offensive
- Greenland
- Discrimination
- Racism
- Culture
- Words