Origin of the name Eskimo

Two principal competing etymologies have been proposed for the name "Eskimo", but the most commonly accepted today appears to be the Montagnais word meaning "snowshoe-netter". The word assime·w means "she laces a snowshoe" in Montagnais. Since Montagnais speakers refer to the neighbouring Mi'kmaq people using words that sound very much like eskimo, Ives Goddard of the Smithsonian Institution has concluded that this is the more likely origin of the word.
Jose Mailhot, a Quebec anthropologist who speaks Montagnais, however, published a paper in 1978 which suggested that the meaning is "people who speak a different language".
Folklore has it that speakers of some Algonkian languages coined the term Eskimo to mean "eaters of raw meat". Linguistic research by anthropologists does not support that etymology, but regardless it is commonly felt in Canada and Greenland that the term Eskimo is pejorative.
While the majority of academic linguists hold the non-pejorative view of Eskimo, the majority of Inuit people believe the word to be racist, and are similarly supported by Algonkian speakers who see the natural similarity in pronunciation to "he eats raw". While the term's proper etymology continues to be held to be neutral by linguists, Native and Métis groups both inside the Inuit and Cree/Ojibwa peoples insist that the term evolving as presented by linguists does not make sense. All Native North American peoples used snowshoes, and as such would not likely choose to use their word for snowshoe to describe any other native people. Whatever the truth, the resulting political response to the perception of Eskimo being pejorative has been significant, with The Inuit Circumpolar Conference meeting in Barrow, Alaska, officially adopting Inuit as a designation for all Eskimos, regardless of their local usages, in 1977.

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