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by adar 1712 days ago
Is there a non-North American context for the word "Hiawatha"?
2 comments

Does it matter to anyone but "outraged" North Americans?

I'd love to have input from people who are Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayugaa, or Seneca.

BTW, I decided to take a look at Apache Incubator's projects to see if there's any outrage over (non-exhaustive list):

- Kafka (Bohemian Jewish writer)

- Chukwa (a dialect of Kulung language of Nepal)

- Geronimo (Apache leader)

- Hama (a city in Syria)

- Apollo, Hermes, Aurora, Aries, Isis (multiple Greek, Roman, and Egyptian gods)

- Joshua (Hebrew name)

- Kylin (name of a mythical creature from East Asian legends)

- Omid (Persian name)

- Onami (Japanese destroyers)

- Pig (insensitive to Muslims)

- Trinidad, and, you guessed it, Tobago (also many other geographical names)

...

“American outlook” here means the outlook of mainstream US culture, not some shared context of everyone who has ever inhabited the land. So the “American” (really, U.S. American) cultural context is in fact not related to Hiawatha at all.

Hiawatha didn’t know what “America” was and presumably wouldn’t have conceptualized himself as being part of a pan-“Native American” identity.

Assuming you could even explain the concept of a web server to a pre-industrial person, it’s impossible to know how he himself would have felt about this.