It's called an idiom, and when interpreted literally or historically they are offensive, like "busting our balls" for example, many many of them are offensive if you put on your HR hat. That said, they are commonly used and in that context are not offensive.
1. (literally) To leave a reservation to which one was restricted.
2. (US, politics) To break with one's party or group, usually temporarily.
3. (by extension) To engage in disruptive activity outside normal bounds.
Why would this term even be seen as negative in an HN context? It sounds like every startup founder/rebellious techy would want to "go off the reservation."
The article two levels above cites that very definition, then goes on to say it's offensive because: "Removing the physical aspect of leaving from the equation, we are left with the ideological aspect that infers, historically, that Native Americans have wanted to be placed on a reservation."
If we ignore the first literal definition, which obviously doesn't apply in this case, and focus on the second and third metaphorical definitions...they seem like admirable behaviors. The original poster's comment about Michele Leonhart, using the second two definitions leads me to believe that either (2) Michele Leonhart can temporarily go across the political aisle (from Republican to Democrat), which is admirable, or (3) Michele Leonhart is disruptive, which is just what we need in Washington. Neither (2) nor (3) is what the poster meant, and they definitely didn't mean (1) unless Michele Leonhart was an Indian who literally left her reservation!
So I'm quite confused by what the intended pejorative was supposed to be.
Describing someone as being "off the reservation" means they need to turn around and go back where they belongs a.s.a.p. The expression is pejorative because it rests on the idea is that Native Americans are actually okay when they're on reservations, and likewise, that they're out of place anywhere else. In reality, reservations are more like prison camps without walls into which these people been unceremoniously dumped.
If you want a brief, brutal look at what "the reservation" really means, see this short film from Aeon called "Honor the Treaties". You'll see exactly why the casual acceptance of reservations as places where anyone "truly" belongs is so problematic.
Getting back to the expression, it should be avoided for the same reason that you'd avoid analogies to slave plantations or concentration camps that imply these institutions were benign, defensible things. It's far better to use the phrase "way out of line", which conveys the same meaning, but without the unthinking disregard for genocide, theft of land, and institutionalized deceit that underpin most reservations. For the people who live on reservations, or are connected to those who do, the term is loaded with a lot of bitterness, futility, alienation, and despair. Not to put too fine a point on it, but suicide rates among young people who grow up on reservations are double what they are anywhere else in America.
As an aside, the Navajo reservation is an interesting exception to this rule in that it encompasses the territory on which the Navajo have lived for more than 10,000 years, and not some crappy godforsaken piece of land to which they were forcibly relocated. So there's a bit more pride in that case. But a history of dismissal and segregation means there's still an unbelievable amount of poverty. As time goes by they look more and more like wounds that never heal.
> Describing someone as being "off the reservation" means they need to turn around and go back where they belongs
I didn't get that intention from the definitions found on the interwebs. Slang dictionary [1]:
> used to slam people who are thinking differently than what their group considers acceptable.
I believe what you are saying is true, its not a phrase I would use but...why do all of these dictionaries get the phrase so wrong as to mean something positive?
One of America's greater shames is the "success" with which it's managed to erase the genocidal history of westward expansion from the collective memory. Spend some time with Indians and you'll get a very different picture of the post-Colubian era. For a brief primer on what was lost, see here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_era
You can also see why having circumstances reduced to a handful of godforsaken reservations was - and remains - a profound trauma. Indeed, the fact that most people have no idea why the terms causes pain is, itself, a source of ongoing pain since is so clearly signals how thoroughly Native suffering has been airbrushed from American history.
Considering that it also connotes that the person off the reservation is completely out of his depth and liable to get swindled extremely badly, I am more than happy to agree that the starry-eyed entrepreneurs are off the reservation.
We can agree that the VCs are the white traders, then, yes? Let's talk about equity.
Says who, you? Do you think phrases that are commonly used can't be offensive? What do idioms have to do with anything anyway?
You can pretend it's the PC police, or if you want to be the kind of person who isn't insensitive towards some subcultures you could try to avoid the phrase. There are plenty of alternatives.
As a firstborn American with a German family, I am not too bothered by "Nazi", "kraut" or other terms... It all depends on context, which is poorly conveyed over text
How exactly is "off the reservation" not offensive in the way that several commonly used idioms are now considered offensive, such as "that is retarded", "that is gay", "you Jewed the price down", "I got gypped"?
>are not offensive.
Right, literally nobody takes offense to "off the reservation" because you of course don't mean Native Americans. Are you seriously saying that slightly racist terms are only ever offensive in literal contexts?
Only one of those is universally considered offensive. One is a recently-manufactured "outrage" that only the terminally-gullible actually find offensive (i.e. folks best described by exactly that adjective). I've never heard of anyone actually taking racially-based offense to the fourth one there, outside of a dumb joke on a bad sitcom 15 years ago, and even then they were faking it.
> One is a recently-manufactured "outrage" that only the terminally-gullible actually find offensive (i.e. folks best described by exactly that adjective).
I can't even tell if you're referring to "retarded" or "gay" here.
I think "gay" is offensive only because it refers to a widely recognized social reality that is still being fought out, the reality that gay people are socially inferior, and that gay bashing is a social art for men.
Take away that reality and "that's gay" becomes an idiom lost in time.
Do you live in a place with a substantial Roma population? Because every Roma person I've met finds the fourth phrase racist. The rest are pretty universally known as offensive, and there's easy substitutes, so why use something that's going to cause offense when you can make the same exact same points 100 different ways?
http://blog.nrcprograms.org/off-the-reservation/