Claudia Putnam asked David Andrew Nichols:

Hi David, wondering if you had any thoughts on the ubiquity of the word squaw in white encounters with Native Americans. I have read about the origins of the term, but when you get out West it seems odd that we keep encountering that term, and that "half-breed" translators and such who ought to know better seem to keep rendering "squaw" in communications with white men when damn out of space..?

David Andrew Nichols Hi, Claudia. The word "squaw" derives from an Algonquian word for "woman." I think it becomes ubiquitous in 19th-century discourse because Anglo-American writers, especially if they are writing for a popular audience, rarely make distinctions between different Indian nations and cultures. They instead present Indians as a uniform and unchanging mass, with (presumably) only one language. This remains a problem into the twentieth century, when the archetypal Indian presented by American media (especially Western movies) is a 19th-century Plains Indian warrior - an atypical culture when set against the whole continent's history and compared to most other Native American groups.

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