Inuit children at boarding school. The sign on the wall behind them reads, “Please do not speak Eskimo.” (1914)
This reminds me of how whole sects of complex Inuktitut dialects were wiped out by Euro settlers. There were hundreds of different and diverse dialects in Canadian Inuktitut languages alone, and a chunk of that was wiped out during early 20th century. That language is already on the brink of collapse (only 35,000 or so now loosely speak it).
They also took away not just their language, but their surnames, and replaced them with ID-numbers. As if taking their children and capturing them into residential schools (where they were systematically gaslighted, sexually abused and experimented on the regular) wasn’t enough, an Inuit child’s name was legit changed to something like “Annie E7-121.”
“Eskimo” is considered a slur here in most of Canada, because of the treatment of Inuit people and creation of the E-number, which was used to segregate and degrade and dehumanize Inuit people into the 70s.
Remember why you shouldn’t use slurs and who they offend. I’m looking at you Edmonton.
You might want to follow @AndersenAngus on Twitter – “Inukologist,” storyteller, preserver of the language, good man. You not only learn about Inuk culture and language (”word of the day”) but it’s like having one of the elders drop by for a chat. Just blundering across his account one day is the main reason I know anything about this history.
