#Mincéirs

[wastedwinter]

Mincéiri women and children and their decorated caravan on route to Cahirmee Horse Fair Elinor Wiltshire, Buttevant, Co. Cork, July 1954

[iffeelscouldkill]

Mincéir // An Luch Siúil // The Walking People

my controversial opinion is that real progress in the north won't be achieved until the world decides to consider the native irish people a white indigenous population like the sámi

[rrrick]

Joseph Philippe Bevillard - Mincéirs

[dykepuffs]

Got reminded about Tinkatink-Tinkatuff-Tinkaton today and just... Christ.

I thought we were better now about slurs and accidental* racism in media, even media that we like?

But there's a Pokemon that is known for stealing scrap metal and getting into fights, that's so hostile that public services can't run in areas where it congregates, it's moveset in all forms starts with "Pickpocket" - And call it "Tink" - That feels like too many coincidences, all around the nucleus of the stereotypes of Nawken, Scottish Gypsy Travellers, Mincéirs or Irish Travellers, Romany Gypsies and Romani people as a whole.

(Note on language use: I'm using Traveller with a capital T throughout this, to mean collectively the nomadic peoples of the UK and Ireland, which includes both Romani and non-Romani people. Mincéirs are an Indigenous people of Ireland who also live in significant numbers in the UK, and Nawken are a nomadic Scottish people with distinct culture and language different to settled Scots language and Scottish people)

First: "Tink" and "Tinker" is a common slur for Travellers and especially for Nawken and Mincéirs in the UK and Ireland, especially in Scotland, Ireland and Northern England. It comes from the historic profession of tinsmithing - mostly cold-working tin and sheet metal to make small items like water jugs and plates - Which is an archetypal "traditional Traveller profession". It's not the kind of slur that anyone particularly reclaims, especially "Tink", and is still very much a modern term of abuse that usually presages violence.

It's still used innocuously as a verb- Like "He tinkers with old radios and classic cars" but it's not something that can be used as a noun, calling someone "a tinker" or even more so "a tink" is unambiguously offensive and a term of racial abuse. Old white people might call a mischievous small child "a little tinker" but that is in the same way as white people will say "a little sa*age" - they're saying "This child is like the Uncivilised (racialised) People" (Closely related- This is also why I have zero sense of humour about white gorjers describing themselves as "feral" in any context - Unless you have actually been the focus of a moral panic about "feral kids" then please, don't)

(Also, yes, Tinkerbell is a somewhat dodgy name. Who would have thought that the same racist Scottish guy who wrote awful stereotypes of Native Americans and First Nations people into his fantasy might also use a term of abuse along with common racist tropes about Nawken - That they're angry, tricksters, and nebulously magical-mystical - in creating another character, and then Disney the notably racist corporation that made the notably racist adaptation of the book just kept it.)

Common stereotypes in the UK and Ireland of Travellers is that we're violent, and thieves, and especially that we steal scrap metal and live in scrapyards, or that our trailers are always surrounded by scrap metal and fly-tipped rubbish. Ambulances, fire engines, and notably taxis often refuse to attend to Traveller sites. Common stereotypes of Travellers everywhere, and especially of Roma, is that we're pickpockets.

From Bulbapedia's Tinkaton article:

"Tinkaton is intelligent and has a reckless personality. It swings its hammer at rocks to send them into the sky, aiming to hit flying corviknight. This Pokémon will also steal anything that it wants and take it back to its dwelling. It has been observed using its hammer like a bed to sleep on."

And from the violet pokedex:

The hammer tops 220 pounds, yet it gets swung around easily by Tinkaton as it steals whatever it pleases and carries its plunder back home.

From Wikipedia's Tinkaton article:

Highly intelligent and daring, they steal items to bring back to their lair, while using their hammer to launch projectiles at their natural prey, the flying Pokémon Corviknight. As a result of this predatory behavior, Corviknight has been unable to provide a taxi service to humans within the region where Tinkaton is found.

From the scarlet and violet pokedex entries for Tinkatuff:

This Pokémon will attack groups of Pawniard and Bisharp, gathering metal from them in order to create a large and sturdy hammer.

These Pokémon make their homes in piles of scrap metal. They test the strength of each other's hammers by smashing them together.

I don't have a great conclusion just it's annoying to see all the talk of Tinkaton being a fan-favourite whilst totally missing the really unfortunate implications of the name, which get worse when paired with the description.

Small Edit: The reason this has made me so miserable today was hearing about a friend's son, who is 8 or 9, and Nawken, and who'd been playing pokemon at school this week with his classmates and they somehow got it into their heads to start calling him Tinkatink and leaving crushed cans and forks and stuff in his desk. Little kids like nothing more than finding a loophole that lets them say a Bad Word (see also "But miss, I was just calling her a female dog! And was asking if her cat smelled bad! I wanted to know what CUNTry he was from hahaha" etc) and this seems to have fallen into the loophole.

[apocalypticavolition]

Let's (re)Read The Eye of the World! Chapter 25: The Traveling People

It's time for another chapter in my reread, and that means spoilers. Spoilers here, spoilers there, spoilers everywhere. Hell, let's have a spoiler for my post: we're going to be talking about slurs at some point this chapter! If you don't know why that is, go read the books. If you do know why that is but you haven't read the whole series, go read the books. Or just stick around if you like spoilers. Anyway.

This chapter starts with the leaves on the vine icon because this chapter introduces us to the way of the leaf. As such, the Tuatha'an will remain associated with it going forward; just about any chapter where they're a big deal will have them!

Perrin was sure she was hunting for the rest of the pack, though she denied it angrily when he suggested as much, denied being afraid of the wolves that paced them, denied worrying about the rest of the pack or what it was up to. She denied, and went right on looking, tight-eyed and wetting her lips uneasily.

Note to self: Remember that as far as Egwene is concerned, these last three days have been spent in constant terror of the wolfpack deciding she's the next meal.

She took a deep breath, and Perrin was wondering if she would succeed in bullying Elyas the way she did him, when he realized she was standing there with her mouth open, not saying a word. Elyas was looking at her, just looking, with those yellow wolf’s eyes. Egwene stepped back from the raw-boned man, and licked her lips, and stepped back again. Before Elyas turned away, she had backed all the way to Bela and scrambled up onto the mare’s back. 

Yeah, she is genuinely not having a good time. And frankly, Elyas doesn't want her to, so that's kinda shitty of him. This is really the first part of the adventure where Egwene's living in the kind of discomfort that the boys were with Moiraine after she destroyed the ferry.

In every dream he remembered there was a point where he straightened from Master Luhhan’s forge to wipe the sweat from his face, or turned from dancing with the village girls on the Green, or lifted his head from a book in front of the fireplace, and whether he was outside or under a roof, there was a wolf close to hand.

Frankly, I cannot imagine a scenario where I was suddenly capable of communing with animals, learning from a dude who had all their badass reflexes, and getting protected from the forces of darkness in my dreams and not immediately jump at the chance for more. Am I crazy or is Perrin?

Still patting the dogs, Elyas studied the stand of trees. “There’ll be Tuatha’an here. The Traveling People.” They stared at him blankly, and he added, “Tinkers.”

Hoo boy. So uh... Hmm. Jordan's Tuatha'an are based on a lot of real people, and that's good. Further, they're stereotyped in ways that the real people are but demonstrate that these aren't accurate or cool. That's also pretty nice. People use slurs against them, and that's not nice but it is accurate. Too accurate, since the term used is not some fantasy term Jordan made up but one that real haters use against real Irish Travellers, the Mincéirs. It's admittedly a far cry from say, having everyone describe the Sharans with the n-word or something, but it's still just... not awesome. It's been like ten thousand years, why are we using the same old slurs? I'm gonna call the Tuatha'an just that, and occasionally the Traveling People if I feel the need to mix it up. Won't change the quotations though; that shit's not cool.

Oh also, while Perrin's just the ignorant country boy who drops non-PC terms, Egwene is the gal who relishes the stereotypes. I can finally stop smacking him with a rolled-up newspaper and move on to her. Bad Egwene!

The Traveling People were going about work that was disappointingly everyday, cooking, sewing, tending children, mending harness, but their clothes were even more colorful than the wagons��and seemingly chosen at random; sometimes coat and breeches, or dress and shawl, went together in a way that hurt his eyes. They looked like butterflies in a field of wildflowers.

You know what's funny? For all of the genre's obsession for having everyone run around wearing brown leather outfits or gray fur coats, actual medieval Europeans were gaudy as all hell. We just don't see it in movies because the average viewer would find such portrayals of "the dark ages" unrealistic. The Tuatha'an having a real world aesthetic that we should be seeing more often is very nice.

“Then we seek still,” the gray-haired man intoned. “As it was, so shall it be, if we but remember, seek, and find.”

Sadly, the Tuatha'an will only do one of those three. They don't remember what the song was and they've idealized it to the point that they'll never actually find it, even when the Dragon Reborn is singing it to bring green back to the land.

“They don’t even know what the song is; they claim they’ll know it when they find it. They don’t know how it’s supposed to bring paradise, either, but they’ve been looking near to three thousand years, ever since the Breaking. I expect they’ll be looking until the Wheel stops turning.”

There's a really interesting... misconception? heresy? IDK... that a lot of the common folk of the setting have that everything good about the AoL is genuinely lost forever, even though they live in a cyclical universe. At some point, whatever inspired the song would be found again and the question is whether or not their people will still exist in a recognizable form by then (since the various Roma, Mincéirs, etc. don't seem to be on an epic quest for a song here five ages later, the answer is sadly "No"). Saying people will be looking forever for history is needlessly hateful.

Or do some people genuinely think that the Dragon and/or the Dark One broke cyclical time and that linearity will reign supreme? Is that where the belief comes from?

After a minute Perrin knew who the fellow reminded him of. Wil al’Seen, who had all the girls staring and whispering behind his back whenever he came up from Deven Ride to Emond’s Field. Wil courted every girl in sight, and managed to convince every one of them that he was just being polite to all the others.

Sadly Perrin, you're not Miss Marple, so your conclusion that this complete stranger is actually just of the same archetype as somebody from your beloved little village life is nowhere near accurate. You're just jealous no one ever looks at you this way. Also, your arc would be a lot more interesting if you did have Miss Marple's superpower.

Dammit Perrin I'm supposed to be giving Egwene shit this time.

Aram’s smile slipped, but when he looked at Perrin it came back again, even more sure than before. “They will not harm you. They make a show to frighten away danger, and warn us, but they are trained according to the Way of the Leaf.”

But Elyas just said the dogs would have tried to bite the gang under some circumstances Aram, and I'm sorry but he's the dog whisperer. I doubt very much y'all can actually train dogs not to attack at all. It's the same kind of delusion that makes certain kinds of vegans think they can convert carnivores.

Least it matches with Aram's inevitable descent into madness and fanaticism.

“It means that no man should harm another for any reason whatsoever.” The Seeker’s eyes flickered to Elyas. “There is no excuse for violence. None. Not ever.” “What if somebody attacks you?” Perrin insisted. “What if somebody hits you, or tries to rob you, or kill you?”

It's nice that Perrin starts out dismissive of the Way of the Leaf since he'll be the one most tempted to convert to it. It's another thing that kinda feels left by the wayside: while he throws the axe away after mutilating someone, he ends up selling his enemies into slavery (which is definitely a kind of violence) and then 1v1ing his nemesis and killing Lanfear. It feels like he should have picked up another approach after all his prevaricating.

“You try telling that to some farm wife who’s just found out her son or daughter has run off with you Tinkers,” Elyas said wryly. 

I might trust his dog-related opinions, but not the rest. People run off with the Tuatha'an because they offer some kind of hope and purpose in a world that is rapidly approaching a critical point of decay. The Way of the Leaf may be a weird philosophy in a world being invaded by the forces of darkness, but like the Whitecloak philosophies or the promise of becoming an Aes Sedai or a Warder, it's something. Gives those people who feel like they have spiritual needs something to focus on, which they're sorely lacking in a world with no organized faith. (I'll rant about that later though.)

Perrin sat back down slowly, still feeling awkward. “What happens to somebody who can’t follow the Way?” he asked. “A Tinker, I mean.” Raen and Ila exchanged a worried look, and Raen said, “They leave us. The Lost go to live in the villages.”

Having worked with Jehovah's Witnesses and heard one of them talk lovingly about his adult son except with the occasional mention of the fact that he was apostate and thus they were never going to be associates again, I have absolutely nothing but contempt for this kind of behavior. It's realistic, but... argh. It's fucked up and evil. Literally the worst part of the Tuatha'an.

Perrin’s eyes shot open. “The Waste? The Aiel Waste? They were crossing the Aiel Waste?” “Some people can enter the Waste without being bothered,” Elyas said. “Gleemen. Peddlers, if they’re honest. The Tuatha’an cross the Waste all the time. Merchants from Cairhien used to, before the Tree, and the Aiel War.”

This is actually also a weird detail, really. Peddlers and Cairhienen merchants had reason to (silk), and gleemen might at least be able to profit off of entertaining Sharans or coming back with exotic tales or performances. But the Tuatha'an don't have much to get out of boiling in the desert for weeks or months on end to visit the trader towns and the Sharans certainly don't want their kids being recruited. I guess the Sharans hadn't been particularly developed at this point in the story and Jordan didn't notice the oddity he'd created when he got to them.

Elyas sat up, his pipe almost falling from between his teeth. “A hundred miles into the Waste? Impossible! Djevik K’Shar, that’s what Trollocs call the Waste. The Dying Ground. They wouldn’t go a hundred miles into the Waste if all the Myrddraal in the Blight were driving them.”

They would if a Forsaken was driving them, and that's what he was doing. I always forget that Ishamael was active two years before the main story; it feels like it should be much more recent. That said, I suppose even he needed time to narrow down the candidates.

He sighed heavily. “She called us the Lost. I never knew before how much they loathe us.” 

I don't think they have much feeling for you one way or another, to be honest. They just have some historical facts, and... since she was a Maiden of the Spear, she wouldn't even have the full story. More early installment weirdness? Or do the Clan Chiefs and Wise Ones let the rest of the Aiel know a little of what's up to justify why they never interact? (Also not super cool of them for enforcing apostasy after this many generations, just saying.)

He was trying to imagine what Aiel girls were like—going into the Blight, where only Warders went that he had ever heard

Yeah that story hasn't been accurate in the last thousand years or more.

Awkwardly he patted her hair. Rand would know what to do, he thought. Rand had an easy way with girls. Not like him, who never knew what to do or say.

Bro, she spent the last three days assuming she was wolf food and the night before that thinking she was going to die in a city of the damned after spending that day being chased by the armies of darkness. You should at least be able to work out that her crying has something to do with that and that her motivation to dance with a pretty boy is mostly an attempt to have something normal happen. Since she's crying specifically with worry about Rand and Mat (no that's cool Egwene, don't name your former mentor specifically), it would still be an inaccurate assumption, but like... Something.

He took a deep breath and looked around uncertainly. “They are alive,” he said finally. “Good.” She scrubbed at her cheeks with quick fingers. “That is what I wanted to hear. Good night, Perrin. Sleep well.” Standing on tiptoe, she brushed a kiss across his cheek and hurried past him before he could speak.

This though... I can't help but feel that she's stopped crying almost on cue and that makes the whole thing feel weird and borderline manipulative on her part. I don't think that's the mood Jordan was going for really because her motivations have been pretty understandable so far. I'm gonna guess that she stopped actually crying before she asked Perrin to say they were alive and his voice is deep enough to seem comforting even though his behavior doesn't seem to reflect that at all? Egwene is definitely reeling, so my plan to give her more shit this chapter didn't really pan out. Oh well, there's always next time - but of course, before we get to that, we'll be seeing Rand and company again in Whitebridge. See you then!

[dragynkeep]

while it has been a while, thank you for the links for shelta vocab. my great grandmother often spoke it around me when i was very little but stopped when i grew older. my grandma died before i was born and my mom refuses to talk about it at all and same with all her siblings and there is no one left on her side alive beyond them. while i don't call myself mincéir, it's nice to know more about my heritage, if that makes sense and its hard to find shelta resources, so ty so much. -ira

It's great that you're reconnecting with that side of your heritage, and I'm sorry about your nan passing like that. It's sad when people don't want to talk about it but I also understand the grief and pain that comes with it.

[daniemililly]

A post about the things women deserve for International Women's Day. Content note for all the things women put up with in this system

I've had a lot of cis, mostly het men treat me like a non-person over the last few years because I made sexy photos they liked. I've had my boundaries pushed and ignored. I've had so many of them say I hated all men because I said I was fed up with all the shitty messages from some men. I've had to deal with their belief that I owed them whatever they wanted, that my disinterest in them was to be tested, that I should have to hear about and see their genitalia without consent, that I should have to listen to their problems and make them feel better without even knowing them

When you are a woman in public, you are seen as a Non-Player Character in the narratives of many cis het men who see themselves as protagonists because stories have always served them and shown us women to be merely objects for them to rate, be mothered by, and fuck

Cis women and trans women and those who are sometimes women and those who are women-adjacent and women-aligned or are perceived to be women, have to steel ourselves to exist and be seen. We have to take it on faith that to make art, to wait tables, to work in a shop, to do sex work, to have a hobby, is to need to protect yourself from attack, and this only becomes worse when you're not white, or you're queer, or you're a Mincéir, or you're any other kind of marginalised

Women should get to exist without fearing for our bodily integrity, for our lives, for our sanity

Women should get to exist without being traumatised again and again, rarely to receive help because we don't even allow ourselves to admit there's anything wrong

Women and those perceived as such deserve to go to the hospital and have our pain taken as seriously as a cis man's pain more often is. Pain should not be the default condition of being a woman, but it so often is

Women and those who need them deserve to be able to get an abortion without having to jump through needless hoops — Free, Safe, Legal, and Local

Women and all people who have experienced sexual assault and abuse should get to tell their stories without fear for the decorum of our society

Women and all people should have access to whatever hormone balance feels right for their bodies without having to plead their case and wait years for their distress to become intolerable — on demand and without delay

Those who get periods should have access to menstrual leave, free period products, and IUDs

Women, for whom care work most often falls to, should not be made to feel like their work has no value, and should be fairly compensated,. Communities should be supported in building networks of care, so that care doesn't become to responsibility of any individual to do on their own

Neurodivergent people perceived as women and girls should have access to care and support as early as many perceived as boys do

Women deserve to be compensated for the years of oppression, of being forced out of jobs due to marriage, pregnancy, and age

Women should be compensated for the years of being treated as incubators, for the forced labour in religious institutions, for the abuse at the hands of powerful and not so powerful men

Women deserve psychological support for processing trauma acquired from living in a world where they have been made less than

Women and those perceived as such deserve the freedom to travel to any part of the world as safely as any man

Women deserve access to toilets, to sanitation, to food

Women deserve to live.

[sixty2]

Mincéirs (Irish Travellers) by Joseph-Philippe Bevillard (Juror’s pick)

‘In 2009, I started photographing Irish Travellers at a horse fair in Ireland. I gained their trust, and they invited me to photograph their families and other clans. I was intrigued by their nomadic lifestyle so I decided to visit their caravans, halting sites and roadside encampments. In March 2017, Irish Travellers were formally recognised as an ethnic group, yet today they are still facing racism, discrimination, hardship by society and high suicide rates’

[principleofplenitude]

Today, nearly half a billion people qualify as Indigenous. If they were a single country, it would be the world’s third most populous, behind China and India. Exactly who counts as Indigenous, however, is far from clear. A video for the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues begins, “They were always here—the original inhabitants.” Yet many peoples who are now considered Indigenous don’t claim to be aboriginal—the Maasai among them. According to Maasai oral histories, their ancestors arrived in Tanzania several hundred years ago from a homeland they call Kerio, likely situated near South Sudan. Conversely, being first doesn’t seem to make you Indigenous. A handful of Gaelic monks and then the Vikings were the first people to arrive in Iceland (they settled there earlier than the Maori arrived in New Zealand), yet their descendants, the Icelanders, are rarely touted as Indigenous. Farther east, modern-day Scandinavians can trace most of their ancestry to migrations occurring in 4000 and in 2500 B.C., but it’s the Sami reindeer herders, whose Siberian ancestors arrived in Scandinavia closer to 1500 B.C., who get an annual entry in the “Indigenous World” yearbook. In place of firstness, a U.N. fact sheet lists self-identification as the key criterion. This doesn’t quite work, either. It is true that some surprising candidates have gained recognition through activist self-designation, such as the Mincéirs of Ireland. (The Mincéirs, sometimes mistakenly called “Irish gypsies,” may have separated from the settled Irish population only several hundred years ago.) Other such groups have been denied recognition. In 1999, when Basters, mixed-race descendants of Khoi pastoralists and Afrikaners, read a statement at a U.N. forum about Indigenous affairs, hundreds of delegates walked out in protest. At the same time, many people are called Indigenous without their knowledge or consent. If it is neither necessary nor sufficient for the Indigenous to be indigenous, what fills the conceptual space? A natural candidate, worryingly, is primitiveness. As several recent books show, centuries of colonialism have entangled indigeneity with outdated images of simple, timeless peoples unsullied by history. In “Beyond Settler Time,” Mark Rifkin observes that popular representations freeze Indigenous peoples in “a simulacrum of pastness.” In “Prophets and Ghosts: The Story of Salvage Anthropology,” Samuel J. Redman describes how efforts to document dying Indigenous cultures often centered on a search for “an idyllic, heavily romanticized, and apparently already bygone era of uncorrupted primitive societies. Indigeneity is powerful. It can give a platform to the oppressed. It can turn local David-vs.-Goliath struggles into international campaigns. Yet there’s also something troubling about categorizing a wildly diverse array of peoples around the world within a single identity—particularly one born of an ideology of social evolutionism, crafted in white-settler states, and burdened with colonialist baggage. Can the status of “Indigenous” really be globalized without harming the people it is supposed to protect? [...]  A politics built around indigeneity, many organizers fear, can reify ethnic boundaries. It encourages people to justify why their ethnic group, and not another, deserves particular resources and accommodations. It weakens domestic ties, which are otherwise critical for oppressed minorities. But it also contributes to one of the stranger consequences arising from a rhetoric of indigeneity: its co-option by far-right nationalists. As peoples like the Maasai have lost confidence in the rhetoric, ethnic nationalists worldwide have come to embrace it. Writing for a Hindu Right propaganda Web site in 2020, a columnist observed, “In the game of woke, we Hindus actually hold all possible cards. We are people of color. We come from an indigenous culture that is different from the organized religions. . . . How could we not be winning every argument?”

“It’s Time to Rethink the Idea of Indigenous” from New Yorker

[heronstill]

Joseph Philippe Bevillard - Mincéirs

[sheltiechicago]

Running Foal, Dublin, Ireland 2022 From The Series 'Mincéirs'

By Joseph-Philippe Bevillard

All About Photo Magazine Awards 2022

[dykepuffs]

Roma and Sinti and Mincéirs and Nawken who are European, even Western European, but have been (in various jurisdictions) forbidden from owning property, going to school, holding various professions, inheriting from their parents, forcibly separated from their parents and deported in an attempt to "Kill the Tinker in the child" and in the case of Roma were enslaved until the c19th etc:

"Europeans are all white rich descendants of colonisers and slave traders"

Well guess what, my country has never been a colonial power profiteering from faraway lands. My land was the one ripped apart by surrounding empires and milked for resources.

You're talking about France, Britain, Belgium etc. — they all still see my people as backward savages. Some of my compatriots are bending backwards so hard to impress these pricks, to prove that "we are European, we are not like them", as if it would change anything in the minds of people for whom everything east of Berlin and south of Madrid is jungle.

[morrigansmuses]

Did you know?

Some 50 per cent of Travellers die before their 39th birthday and some 70 per cent fail to live past the age of 59. The startling findings contained in a new book on Traveller mortality suggest that life expectancy in the Traveller community is equivalent to that of settled people in Ireland in the 1940s.

Only 13% attend secondary school compared with. 92% of the general population and only 1% go to college.

Suicide rates are 7 times higher for them. 1 in 11 deaths are by suicide.

One in four women in prison is from a Traveller background, despite the ethnic group making up just 0.7% of the overall population.

The government committed cultural genocide against them and got away with it.

[thismustbetheblog]

[burnitalldownism]

Sorry I’m a bit late, but happy Traveller Pride Week!

Always remember the time I had two lads (without needing to be asked) on horseback help me chase down a dog that had pulled out of its collar.

[dykepuffs]

This highlights a point that as a Romani person I really, really need to make: Please, do not "correct" us when we say that Gypsy is a word that we use for ourselves, and definitely 100% don't compare it to a word for a thing that shouldn't even be hinted at, never mind named.

A few things:

1) Yes, Gypsy is a contested word in a lot of ways - It’s an exonym, obviously, and it comes from one of several possible misunderstandings. Leading competitors:

- That the Roma arriving in Scotland in the 15th and 16th centuries were believed erroneously by the local people to be Egyptians from Egypt, because of our dark skin and mysterious language (Being a very Indo- end of the Indo-European family, it wouldn't have been as easily placed by an English speaker as something obviously Scandinavian, Germanic, Romance etc, even to a learned person who spoke French and Latin too)

- That Roma arriving in Scotland deliberately passed themselves off as Coptic Christians from Egypt, in the hope of being welcomed as fellow-Christians by the King.

- That Roma were described as Egyptian because of having arrived from Little Egypt, a district around the port in the Netherlands, the equivalent of talking about "Windrush generation" or "Plymouth colonists", naming the people for their port of departure or their boat, rather than their origin.

- That "Egyptian" was already a catchall term for a style of eccentric dress and speech (because of older kinds of racism, potentially based in biblical allegory)

- That it comes from a misunderstanding of our language, because "jip" is a near homophone of a word in our language for speech. Mangle that up with the English tendency to make collective nouns from adjectives with an -ies or -sies sound and effectively we're "The Talkers" or "The speakers of Gypsy language".

- I don't know which of these is true and I don't know if anyone does really!

2) Gypsy is a Scots word and an English word - The first people that it was applied to were the ancestors of modern Romanichal or Romany people now living in the UK and Ireland (and Scandinavia, via a complicated route), who now largely also call themselves Gypsies or Gypsy Travellers too.

2b) There are a lot of exonyms of the Romani peoples in a lot of different languages, and none of them are directly translatable: Gitano doesn't mean the same thing as z------r doesn't mean the same thing as tzigane doesn't mean the same thing as gypsy doesn't mean the same thing as cikánska, etc. These are all exonyms for Romani peoples in different languages, but each one has different implications, different subtle shades of meaning and use, and is thought of differently by the speakers of those languages - Which is often divided up by vitsa, to some extent.

3) Vitsa isn't a commonly used term in English, where many Romany people (yes, because of English monolingualism and a long history of holding difference between us and "The Continent") think of ourselves as Gypsies with no modifier, or Romany Gypsies, and Roma from mainland Europe as "Continental Roma" first - Reflected in the annoying "GRT" acronym, where Gypsy stands for the mostly English-as-first-language nomadic or historically-nomadic Romany and Kale Gypsies and Gypsy Travellers, Roma stands for the mostly not-nomadic immigrant-within-living-memory Vlax-group speaking Roma who usually also speak another European language, and Traveller stands for Mincéirs and Nawken.

- It's also reflected in the names of a lot of our organisations and services like Gypsy And Traveller Exchange, Gypsy Liaison Offices, Gypsy Law Handbook, and going way back to the 1970s the Gypsy Council. It's the box we tick on the census or medical intake forms, employee questionnaires etc, to make sure that local councils and jobsites and hospitals make provision for us in various ways. I'll also plug Cherry Valentine's beautiful film Gypsy Queen and Proud here, may the earth be a feather bed for her.

4) It really hurts when people who aren't Gypsies tell us, effectively, that we are too ignorant to decide what to call ourselves. Every call of "They shouldn't use that word, it needs to be obscured, starred out, you must always say Rrromani!" feels like absolute proof that the bigots are right, that what we are is such a bad thing that it shouldn't be mentioned in polite society.

5) Romanes, and to the same extent the poggady chib, is a language that was devalued and criminalised in what's now the UK - In the 16th century, Gypsies and "counterfeit Egyptians" (ie, the people who lived with us but who were not Roma) would be executed, and one of the things used as evidence of Gypsiness was the speaking of Romanes - of the chib - of "Jibberish" (which is where that word comes from, the perception of our language - amaro chib - as nonsensical babbling). Through to the 19th century, our language was treated as an extenuating circumstance in crime which made transportation to Australia as a convict an appropriate punishment, in the 20th century it was often described as "language defecits" and used to justify kidnapping our children to sell into slavery to Canadian settlers, and even now in the 21st century it is mentioned in court records as "ancient thieves' slang", and children speaking it in school are disciplined heavily- we are taught that it isn't a "real language" and that it is code or slang or low-class, and that anyone speaking it is criminal and secretive.

The other words for us in English, other than Gypsy, are all Romani words - Romani, from our word for us collectively, and singularly our words for man and wife, girl and boy.

Given all of that history of persecution and the threat of how we are treated for speaking our language, I do not want to perform even one single word of it for settled people at their command. I don't care if they prefer to hear "Rromani", if it makes them feel more comfy-cozy and like a good ally to listen to words in our language that they have spent hundreds of years trying to hang us for, they can hear "Gypsy" because they do not deserve to listen to the music given to us by our families, and can choke on why they have managed to make being a Gypsy something like an insult.

How Do I Make My Fictional Gypsies Not Racist?

(Or, "You can't, sorry, but…")

You want to include some Gypsies in your fantasy setting. Or, you need someone for your main characters to meet, who is an outsider in the eyes of the locals, but who already lives here. Or you need a culture in conflict with your settled people, or who have just arrived out of nowhere. Or, you just like the idea of campfires in the forest and voices raised in song. And you’re about to step straight into a muckpile of cliches and, accidentally, write something racist.

(In this, I am mostly using Gypsy as an endonym of Romany people, who are a subset of the Romani people, alongside Roma, Sinti, Gitano, Romanisael, Kale, etc, but also in the theory of "Gypsying" as proposed by Lex and Percy H, where Romani people are treated with a particular mix of orientalism, criminalisation, racialisation, and othering, that creates "The Gypsy" out of both nomadic peoples as a whole and people with Romani heritage and racialised physical features, languages, and cultural markers)

Enough of my friends play TTRPGs or write fantasy stories that this question comes up a lot - They mention Dungeons and Dragons’ Curse Of Strahd, World Of Darkness’s Gypsies, World Of Darkness’s Ravnos, World of Darkness’s Silent Striders… And they roll their eyes and say “These are all terrible! But how can I do it, you know, without it being racist?”

And their eyes are big and sad and ever so hopeful that I will tell them the secret of how to take the Roma of the real world and place them in a fictional one, whilst both appealing to gorjer stereotypes of Gypsies and not adding to the weight of stereotyping that already crushes us. So, disappointingly, there is no secret.

Gypsies, like every other real-world culture, exist as we do today because of interactions with cultures and geography around us: The living waggon, probably the archetypal thing which gorjer writers want to include in their portrayals of nomads, is a relatively modern invention - Most likely French, and adopted from French Showmen by Romanies, who brought it to Britain. So already, that’s a tradition that only spans a small amount of the time that Gypsies have existed, and only a small number of the full breadth of Romani ways of living. But the reasons that the waggon is what it is are based on the real world - The wheels are tall and iron-rimmed, because although you expect to travel on cobbled, tarmac, or packed-earth roads and for comparatively short distances, it wasn’t rare to have to ford a river in Britain in the late nineteenth century, on country roads. They were drawn by a single horse, and the shape of that horse was determined by a mixture of local breeds - Welsh cobs, fell ponies, various draft breeds - as well as by the aesthetic tastes of the breeders. The stove inside is on the left, so that as you move down a British road, the chimney sticks up into the part where there will be the least overhanging branches, to reduce the chance of hitting it.

So taking a fictional setting that looks like (for example) thirteenth century China (with dragons), and placing a nineteenth century Romanichal family in it will inevitably result in some racist assumptions being made, as the answer to “Why does this culture do this?” becomes “They just do it because I want them to” rather than having a consistent internal logic.

Some stereotypes will always follow nomads - They appear in different forms in different cultures, but they always arise from the settled people's same fears: That the nomads don't share their values, and are fundamentally strangers. Common ones are that we have a secret language to fool outsiders with, that we steal children and disguise them as our own, that our sexual morals are shocking (This one has flipped in the last half century - From the Gypsy Lore Society's talk of the lascivious Romni seductress who will lie with a strange man for a night after a 'gypsy wedding', to today's frenzied talk of 'grabbing' and sexually-conservative early marriages to ensure virginity), that we are supernatural in some way, and that we are more like animals than humans. These are tropes where if you want to address them, you will have to address them as libels - there is no way to casually write a baby-stealing, magical succubus nomad without it backfiring onto real life Roma. (The kind of person who has the skills to write these tropes well, is not the kind of person who is reading this guide.)

It’s too easy to say a list of prescriptive “Do nots”, which might stop you from making the most common pitfalls, but which can end up with your nomads being slightly flat as you dance around the topics that you’re trying to avoid, rather than being a rich culture that feels real in your world.

So, here are some questions to ask, to create your nomadic people, so that they will have a distinctive culture of their own that may (or may not) look anything like real-world Romani people: These aren't the only questions, but they're good starting points to think about before you make anything concrete, and they will hopefully inspire you to ask MORE questions.

First - Why are they nomadic? Nobody moves just to feel the wind in their hair and see a new horizon every morning, no matter what the inspirational poster says. Are they transhumant herders who pay a small rent to graze their flock on the local lord’s land? Are they following migratory herds across common land, being moved on by the cycle of the seasons and the movement of their animals? Are they seasonal workers who follow man-made cycles of labour: Harvests, fairs, religious festivals? Are they refugees fleeing a recent conflict, who will pass through this area and never return? Are they on a regular pilgrimage? Do they travel within the same area predictably, or is their movement governed by something that is hard to predict? How do they see their own movements - Do they think of themselves as being pushed along by some external force, or as choosing to travel? Will they work for and with outsiders, either as employees or as partners, or do they aim to be fully self-sufficient? What other jobs do they do - Their whole society won’t all be involved in one industry, what do their children, elderly, disabled people do with their time, and is it “work”?

If they are totally isolationist - How do they produce the things which need a complex supply chain or large facilities to make? How do they view artefacts from outsiders which come into their possession - Things which have been made with technology that they can’t produce for themselves? (This doesn’t need to be anything about quality of goods, only about complexity - A violin can be made by one artisan working with hand tools, wood, gut and shellac, but an accordion needs presses to make reeds, metal lathes to make screws, complex organic chemistry to make celluloid lacquer, vulcanised rubber, and a thousand other components)

How do they feel about outsiders? How do they buy and sell to outsiders? If it’s seen as taboo, do they do it anyway? Do they speak the same language as the nearby settled people (With what kind of fluency, or bilingualism, or dialect)? Do they intermarry, and how is that viewed when it happens? What stories does this culture tell about why they are a separate people to the nearby settled people? Are those stories true? Do they have a notional “homeland” and do they intend to go there? If so, is it a real place?

What gorjers think of as classic "Gipsy music" is a product of our real-world situation. Guitar from Spain, accordions from the Soviet Union (Which needed modern machining and factories to produce and make accessible to people who weren't rich- and which were in turn encouraged by Soviet authorities preferring the standardised and modern accordion to the folk traditions of the indigenous peoples within the bloc), brass from Western classical traditions, via Balkan folk music, influences from klezmer and jazz and bhangra and polka and our own music traditions (And we influence them too). What are your people's musical influences? Do they make their own instruments or buy them from settled people? How many musical traditions do they have, and what are they all for (Weddings, funerals, storytelling, campfire songs, entertainment...)? Do they have professional musicians, and if so, how do those musicians earn money? Are instrument makers professionals, or do they use improvised and easy-to-make instruments like willow whistles, spoons, washtubs, etc? (Of course the answer can be "A bit of both")

If you're thinking about jobs - How do they work? Are they employed by settled people (How do they feel about them?) Are they self employed but providing services/goods to the settled people? Are they mostly avoidant of settled people other than to buy things that they can't produce themselves? Are they totally isolationist? Is their work mostly subsistence, or do they create a surplus to sell to outsiders? How do they interact with other workers nearby? Who works, and how- Are there 'family businesses', apprentices, children with part time work? Is it considered 'a job' or just part of their way of life? How do they educate their children, and is that considered 'work'? How old are children when they are considered adult, and what markers confer adulthood? What is considered a rite of passage?

When they travel, how do they do it? Do they share ownership of beasts of burden, or each individually have "their horse"? Do families stick together or try to spread out? How does a child begin to live apart from their family, or start their own family? Are their dwellings something that they take with them, or do they find places to stay or build temporary shelter with disposable material? Who shares a dwelling and why? What do they do for privacy, and what do they think privacy is for?

If you're thinking about food - Do they hunt? Herd? Forage? Buy or trade from settled people? Do they travel between places where they've sown crops or managed wildstock in previous years, so that when they arrive there is food already seeded in the landscape? How do they feel about buying food from settled people, and is that common? If it's frowned upon - How much do people do it anyway? How do they preserve food for winter? How much food do they carry with them, compared to how much they plan to buy or forage at their destinations? How is food shared- Communal stores, personal ownership?

Why are they a "separate people" to the settled people? What is their creation myth? Why do they believe that they are nomadic and the other people are settled, and is it correct? Do they look different? Are there legal restrictions on them settling? Are there legal restrictions on them intermixing? Are there cultural reasons why they are a separate people? Where did those reasons come from? How long have they been travelling? How long do they think they've been travelling? Where did they come from? Do they travel mostly within one area and return to the same sites predictably, or are they going to move on again soon and never come back?

And then within that - What about the members of their society who are "unusual" in some way: How does their society treat disabled people? (are they considered disabled, do they have that distinction and how is it applied?) How does their society treat LGBT+ people? What happens to someone who doesn't get married and has no children? What happens to someone who 'leaves'? What happens to young widows and widowers? What happens if someone just 'can't fit in'? What happens to someone who is adopted or married in? What happens to people who are mixed race, and in a fantasy setting to people who are mixed species? What is taboo to them and what will they find shocking if they leave? What is society's attitude to 'difference' of various kinds?

Basically, if you build your nomads from the ground-up, rather than starting from the idea of "I want Gypsies/Buryats/Berbers/Minceiri but with the numbers filed off and not offensive" you can end up with a rich, unique nomadic culture who make sense in your world and don't end up making a rod for the back of real-world cultures.