Basque, a Valid Claim

There is a lot of people out there that for some reason refuse to accept that the Basques have the right to call themselves Basques, nor French nor Spaniard, but Basque.

Well, here you have an essay about how Basque is an actual nationality.

Check it out, it appeared at the Center for Basque Studies's web site back in 1968:

The Basques

by Dr. William A. Douglass

Nevada has one of the largest concentrations of Basque people in the entire United States. The communities of Reno, Gardnerville, Winnemucca, Elko, Eureka, and Ely all have one or more Basque hotels or restaurants famed for their “family-style” dinners. This past summer Basque festivals were held in the Elko, Ely, and Reno-Sparks areas. Governor Laxalt is of Basque descent as are many prominent ranchers, businessmen, and professional persons throughout the state. Yet to the majority of Nevadans the Basque people are an obscure and poorly understood ethnic group.

Part of the confusion stems from the fact that the same man who proudly declares that he is a Basque acknowledges that he or his parents were born in either Spain or France. Since there is presently no Basque political state the average person might question the grounds on which the claim for a distinct Basque identity is based. However, this claim is neither spurious nor based entirely on pride; it is rooted firmly in reality. Anthropologists and other social scientists have long acknowledged that the Basque are a unique people in the broader panorama of European cultures. This assumption is based upon the evidence afforded by the Basque language and by certain features of their biological makeup.

The Basque language is totally unrelated to the Indo-European family of languages which dominates the continent (i.e., the Romance languages such as Spanish and French, Slavonic languages such as Russian, and the Teutonic languages such as German and English). For several centuries investigators have sought to demonstrate a relationship between Basque and other language families throughout the world. Different authorities have postulated an affinity between Basque and such languages as old Egyptian, Japanese, Iroquois, Berber, the various Georgian languages (found in the Caucasus mountains of Russia) and Iberian (a language spoken on the Iberian peninsula before it was subjected to Roman influence). Others have gone so far as to suggest that Basque was the original human tongue spoken in the Garden of Eden or that it was the vernacular on the lost continent of Atlantis. Presently the two theories receiving the most attention are that Basque is related to Georgian or that it is related to Iberian. However, while these studies are suggestive, they are far from final. We simply lack adequate evidence at this time to conclusively relate Basque to any other known language.

The evidence provided by physical anthropologists in their investigations of Basque blood typology supports the contention that they are different from their neighbors. The Basque population was found to have the lowest incidence in Europe of blood type B (less than 3% as compared to 8-17% for other European peoples). Basques have a higher incidence of blood type O. Finally, it has been established that the Basque people have the highest incidence of any people in the world of the Rh negative blood type. In this last respect, they differ sharply from the neighboring French and Spanish populations.

The evidence that the Basque people are a unique ethnic group unrelated to other European peoples poses a question as to their origins. The most likely theory at present is that the Basque people stem from an extremely ancient stock that has remained in situ in the western Pyrenees from a time antedating more recent (although prehistorical) movements of peoples across the face of Europe.

The uniqueness of the Basque people and the mystery surrounding their origins have long attracted the attention of scholars. In Europe there are several academic institutions and museums engaged in Basque research. There are several journals devoted exclusively to Basque Studies. IN this country the American Museum of Natural History, the University of Idaho, and the University of Nevada, Reno have Basque Studies Program s. The programs at Nevada and Idaho are particularly interested in a neglected phase of Basque Studies, namely, documenting the historical movement of Basque immigrants into the American West, their contributions to the development of the western way of life, and their subsequent assimilation into the wider society. This is an unwritten chapter in both Basque Studies and American History.

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