![]() ![]() Alan Shaterian of University of California, Berkeley told Kendall that the word could have its roots in the Yavapai language spoken in Arizona. There’s one other theory of note, though it’s not as well known as the first two. “It’s always going to be an antagonistic relationship between indigenous people and the colonial people,” he added. “ They were calling each other ‘idiot’ all those years,” he told an interviewer in 1996, a few years after the publication of his story collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. Native American writer Sherman Alexie, who is of Coeur D’Alene descent, has said that kemosabe means “idiot” in Apache. But the theory has plenty of proponents regardless. As Chadwick Allen explains in “Hero with Two Faces: The Lone Ranger as Treaty Discourse,” this interpretation has mostly been pushed by American linguists who want to “locate Tonto ‘appropriately’ in the Pueblo southwest,” and there isn’t much evidence for it. Is the Lone Ranger a racist who calls his partner an idiot? Is Tonto in turn being subversive when he addresses his white companion as an ignoramus? Noting that tonto in Spanish means “stupid” or “crazy,” some people have pointed out that kemosabe sounds a lot like the Spanish phrase quien no sabe, “he who doesn’t understand.” (In Spanish-language versions of The Lone Ranger, Tonto is called Toro, Spanish for bull.) This suggests a whole different dynamic between the two characters. There is another theory that gives the word an entirely different meaning. ![]()
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