Four centuries ago, the roots of Thanksgiving first took hold in our American soil. We living today commemorate the solemn dinner, back in the fall of 1621, shared by the Pilgrims of Plymouth, Mass., and the Wampanoag Indians, the local tribe who generously pulled the fragile Pilgrim colony through their first winter and taught them how to plant corn.
Let’s talk turkey about our Native American heritage. Suppose you had been one of the early explorers or settlers of North America. You would have found many things in your new land unknown to you. The handiest way of filling voids in your vocabulary would have been to ask the locals what words they used. The early colonists began borrowing words from Native Americans almost from the moment of their first , and many of those names have remained in our everyday language:
In a letter that English explorer John Smith wrote home in 1608 he described a critter that the Algonquian called a rahaughcum. Over the years the word was shortened and simplified to raccoon, one of the very first English words coined in America.
Pronouncing many of the Native American words was difficult for the early explorers and settlers. In many instances, they had to shorten and simplify the names. Identify the following animals from their Native American names:
apossoun (Don’t play dead now.)
otchock (How much wood?)
segankw (What’s black and white and stinks all over?)
The hidden animals are: opossum (Algonquian), woodchuck (Narragansett) and skunk (Algonquian). To this menagerie we may add the likes of caribou (Micmac), chipmunk (Ojibwa), moose (Algonquian), muskrat (Abenaki) and porgy (Algonquian).
You can expand the lexicon with the likes of food — squash (Narragansett), pecan (Algonquian), hominy (Algonquian), pone (Algonquian), pemmican (Cree) and succotash (Narragansett) — and other ingredients of Native American life — moccasin (Chippewa), toboggan (Algonquian), tomahawk (Algonquian), wigwam (Abenaki), teepee (Dakota), caucus (Algonquian), powwow (Narragansett), wampum (Massachuset), bayou (Choctaw), potlatch (Chinook), hogan (Navajo), hickory (Algonquian), kayak (Inuit), parka (Aleut), totem (Ojibwa), sachem (Narraganset), papoose (Narragansett) and mugwump (Natick).
If you examine a map of the United States, you will realize how freely settlers used words of Indian origin to name the places where we live. Rivers, lakes, ponds, creeks, mountains, valleys, counties, towns and cities as large as Chicago (from a Fox word that means “place that stinks of onions”) bear Native American names. Four of our five Great Lakes — Huron, Ontario, Michigan and Erie — and 25 of our states have names borrowed from Native American words:
Alabama: name of a tribe in the Creek Confederacy; Alaska: mainland (Aleut); Arizona: place of the little springs (Papago); Arkansas: downstream people (Sioux); Connecticut: place of the long river (Algonquian);
Idaho: behold the sun coming down the mountains (Shoshone); Illinois: superior people (Illini); Iowa: beautiful land (Ioway); Kansas: south wind people (Sioux); Kentucky: meadowland (Cherokee);
Massachusetts: great hill place (Massachuset); Michigan: great water (Chippewa); Minnesota: milky blue water (Sioux); Mississippi: father of waters (Ojibwa); Missouri: people of the large canoes (Fox);
Nebraska: flat water (Sioux); North Dakota and South Dakota: friendly, allies; Ohio: great river (Iroquois); Oklahoma: red people (Choctaw);
Tennessee: name of a Cherokee village; Texas: friends (Tejas); Utah: name of a Ute tribe; Wisconsin: gathering of waters (Algonquian); Wyoming: at the big river flat (Munsee).
Some of our loveliest place names began life as Native American words — Susquehanna, Shenandoah and Rappahannock. Such names are the stuff of poetry. To Walt Whitman, Monongahela “rolls with venison richness upon the palate.” William Penn wrote about the Leni-Lenape Indians: “I know not a language spoken in Europe that hath words of more sweetness and greatness.” How fortunate we are that the poetry the First Peoples heard in the American landscape lives on in our American language.
