ochre

When, in the 1500s, Western Europeans came to what we now call Newfoundland, they saw the people who were already living there and called them “Red Indians,” because those people – the Beothuk – painted themselves and their dwellings with red ochre every spring.

The red ochre was made from the soil there. So, as the Beothuk were the autochthonous people of Newfoundland, and as autochthonous comes from Greek αὐτόχθων autókhthōn meaning ‘from the land itself’, you could say that they were covering themselves in the earth that was their mother. Of course, we know that the Beothuk came from other peoples on the North American continent, and they in turn came from others in other places, and so on. But they were sustained by that red soil, and it became part of them too; there are many shades of “autochthonous.”

But that is not the only potential lexical perplexity here. If you are familiar with the many names of art pigments, you may not think of ochre as red at all. And you would be perfectly reasonable in that.

Ochre, as you will find if you look in Wiktionary, is “a somewhat dark yellow orangish colour” – they show you RGB #E3A857  ; if you look in Wikipedia, it declares it to be RGB #CC7722  . Either way, it is no redder than French’s mustard. It does look like a certain kind of earth, but not the kind of earth that produced the ruddy pigments used not just by the Beothuk but, subsequently, by European-descended people throughout Newfoundland to paint – among other things – fishing stages (mainlanders call them fishing sheds or boat houses or such like). 

The resolution of this is that ochre is a family of pigments, all containing ferric oxide and the various other things that make up dirt, and typically bound together with oil (from fish or seals or whatever else you may find). There is red ochre, purple ochre, brown ochre, sienna, and umber – yes, umber is of the ochre family (would you have bet on that? what’s the ochre-umber on that, do you think?). But the ochre that is “ochre ochre” is yellow ochre.

That’s not just from commonality or history of use; it’s from etymology too. Although we may be tempted to think that ochre comes from some chthonic word to do with earth – or perhaps, since it sounds like “oaker,” from something that grows in the earth (not okra, though) – it comes, in fact, from ὠχρός ōkhrós ‘pale’.

Which, I suppose, when I compare it with umber, and sienna, and red ochre, it is. But when I compare it with my own skin, which is around the colour of the skin of the Western Europeans who called the Beothuk “Red Indians,” it occurs to me that yellow ochre is not nearly as pale. But yellow ochre also a bit too yellow, as if jaundiced. Not necessarily a healthy colour for a person.

Nor, as I find, was it a colour esteemed by the Greeks, at least when used to describe people. Aristophanes, in The Clouds, used χροιὰν ὠχράν khroiàn ōkhrán “pallid complexion” as a sign of moral weakness; Euripides, in The Bacchae, used turning pale as a sign of fright: οὐδ᾽ ὠχρός, οὐδ᾽ ἤλλαξεν οἰνωπὸν γένυν oud’ ōkhrós, oud’ ḗllaxen oinōpòn génun “he did not turn pale or change the wine-dark complexion of his cheek”; and Plutarch, in his life of Julius Caesar, quoted Caesar as saying οὐ πάνυ τούτους δέδοικα τοὺς παχεῖς καί κομήτας, μᾶλλον δὲ τοὺς ὠχροὺς καί λεπτοὺς ἐκείνους ou panú toútous dédoika toùs pakheĩs kaí komḗtas, mãllon dè toùs ōkhroùs kaí leptoùs ekeínous “I am not much in fear of these fat, long-haired fellows, but rather of those pale, thin ones” (by which he meant Brutus and Cassius).

Those yellow-bellies! Perhaps it’s that dirty people do dirty deeds? But the pigment is named for its colour, not the colour for its source. And ochre is called many things in many places; it’s been used since before the beginning of recorded history all around the world, anywhere there is soil with iron ores in it that can be made into a paint. It is common in cave paintings from up to 75,000 years ago. It is, truly, as old as dirt.

And we, whatever colour we may be said to be – red or pale or any other – will return to dirt as well, as we always have, and as the Beothuk, all of them, eventually did due to starvation, pestilence, and murder. Who can say for certain that the ochre we dab onto the stages of our lives and the walls of our histories does not contain bits of our distant ancestors and distant ancient cousins? And just as we come in many colours, so does ochre – indeed, ochre comes in colours we don’t: after all, the Beothuk weren’t actually red. Look at the portrait of the last known Beothuk, Shanawdithit, who died of tuberculosis in 1829: her skin was a medium light brown. 

But just as the blood that runs through the veins of every one of us is red from the iron in it, so does all ochre gain colour from the iron in it. And so, when the Europeans saw the red ochre on the Beothuk and thought it was different from their own pale colour, it was doubly ironic.