The Discursive Construction of “Women” in Las Américas:

The Ambiguous Nature of the “Indian” in Early Terminology

The very naming of the people of the Americas as “Indian,” and the continued use of this term even after the realization that this land was not in fact anywhere in the world previously known to Europeans, signals the level upon which the people of the Americas were being integrated into European discourse.

The term “Indian” was used interchangeably with the names “Kush” and “Ethiopia” since antiquity to the modern period in Greco-Roman, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic texts.[1] For example, Herodutus who wrote in the 5^th century BC called Indians “Ethiopians,” distinguishing only between “wooly-haired Ethiopians” and “straight-haired Ethiopians.” The terms Ethiopian and Indian were also used interchangeably in the travel writings of Marco Polo, written in 1298. Petrus Alliacus’ (al-lee-ay-see-us) Imago Mundi from 1410, the book that Christopher Columbus carried with him on his voyages across the Atlantic, similarly refers to “two Ethiopias.”[2] It is this historical context of the interchangeable usage of the words “Indian” and “Ethiopian” that, I think, offers some insight into the ensuing naming and treatment of the people of the Americas.

Although not all slaves in Europe were black at the time of contact, the African slave trade was expanding, and there was a growing correlation being made that all Africans, that is “Ethiopians,” were meant to be slaves.[3] The interchangeability of terms used to denote a wide variety of peoples points to the ambiguous nature of defining unfamiliar people, and not in discrete continental categories, at this time.

[1] David M Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 212.

[2] Petrus Alliacus, Imago Mundi (Wilmington: Linprint Company, 1948), Chapter 37.

[3] This story from the Bible has been the main justification for the African slave trade and would be used as late as 1838 to argue the inherent subordinate status of Black Africans. See Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham, 1.