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Describing someone as being "off the reservation" means they need to turn around and go back where they belongs a.s.a.p. The expression is pejorative because it
by alexqgb 12y ago
Describing someone as being "off the reservation" means they need to turn around and go back where they belongs a.s.a.p. The expression is pejorative because it rests on the idea is that Native Americans are actually okay when they're on reservations, and likewise, that they're out of place anywhere else. In reality, reservations are more like prison camps without walls into which these people been unceremoniously dumped.
If you want a brief, brutal look at what "the reservation" really means, see this short film from Aeon called "Honor the Treaties". You'll see exactly why the casual acceptance of reservations as places where anyone "truly" belongs is so problematic.
http://aeon.co/film/the-real-legacy-of-manifest-destiny/ http://aeon.co/film/the-real-legacy-of-manifest-destiny/
Getting back to the expression, it should be avoided for the same reason that you'd avoid analogies to slave plantations or concentration camps that imply these institutions were benign, defensible things. It's far better to use the phrase "way out of line", which conveys the same meaning, but without the unthinking disregard for genocide, theft of land, and institutionalized deceit that underpin most reservations. For the people who live on reservations, or are connected to those who do, the term is loaded with a lot of bitterness, futility, alienation, and despair. Not to put too fine a point on it, but suicide rates among young people who grow up on reservations are double what they are anywhere else in America.
As an aside, the Navajo reservation is an interesting exception to this rule in that it encompasses the territory on which the Navajo have lived for more than 10,000 years, and not some crappy godforsaken piece of land to which they were forcibly relocated. So there's a bit more pride in that case. But a history of dismissal and segregation means there's still an unbelievable amount of poverty. As time goes by they look more and more like wounds that never heal.
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago> Describing someone as being "off the reservation" means they need to turn around and go back where they belongs I didn't get that intention from the definitions found on the interwebs. Slang dictionary [1]: > used to slam people who are thinking differently than what their group considers acceptable. I believe what you are saying is true, its not a phrase I would use but...why do all of these dictionaries get the phrase so wrong as to mean something positive? [1] http://onlineslangdictionary.com/meaning-definition-of/off-the-reservation http://onlineslangdictionary.com/meaning-definition-of/off-t...
- alexqgb 12y agoOne of America's greater shames is the "success" with which it's managed to erase the genocidal history of westward expansion from the collective memory. Spend some time with Indians and you'll get a very different picture of the post-Colubian era. For a brief primer on what was lost, see here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_era http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_era You can also see why having circumstances reduced to a handful of godforsaken reservations was - and remains - a profound trauma. Indeed, the fact that most people have no idea why the terms causes pain is, itself, a source of ongoing pain since is so clearly signals how thoroughly Native suffering has been airbrushed from American history.