Echoes From the Past: America's Indian Names

Today, Native Americans or ‘American Indians’ make up only 1.6 per cent of the US population. Yet countless place names of Indian origin remain, like echoes from the past. They co-exist with names given by Europeans and their descendants. Poughkeepsie (New York), Pennacook (New Hampshire) or Yowaccomoco (Maryland) are towns  or villages whose names are of Indian origin, while South Dakota and Texas are states with Indian names. In fact, about half of the fifty US states have names related to Indian words. They include Minnesota, which means ‘clear blue water,’ Nebraska, ‘flat water,’ Massachusetts, ‘near the great hill,’ and Oklahoma, ‘red people.’ 

THE EUROPEANS

When Columbus ‘discovered’ the American continent in 1492, between 3.8 and 18 million ‘indios’ (so called, as Columbus believed he had reached the Indies) lived throughout the vast area of land that would become the United States of America. They belonged to hundreds of distinct cultural groups and spoke over two hundred different languages. Soon missionaries, traders and settlers were arriving from Spain, Holland, France and England. They named many towns and colonies (later to become states) after European cities, monarchs, important men or saints. 

FORCED OUT

From the end of the American Revolution in the late 18th century and throughout the 19th century, the ‘white’ settlement that had begun in the northeast of the US expanded into extensive new territories, claiming the south and the west, as far as the Pacific Ocean. In 1830, a law authorized the removal of Indians to a ‘permanent Indian Territory’ west of the Mississippi River. New settlers searching for land for farming, for gold or for other resources forced the Indians off their land. Some tribes adapted, but many more fled, died of starvation and disease or were killed in conflicts that went on into the 20th century.

MYSTERIOUS ORIGINS

White people often built their settlements on top of ancient Indian ones, and their original names have been lost. Washington, D.C. is named after the first US president, George Washington, although it used to be an important trading town of the Piscataway people called Naconchtanke. Where Indian names have remained, their origins can be mysterious. Indian place names were often europeanized, simplified, or mistranslated. Tribes also travelled: Miami in Florida is named after the Miami people, who originally came from near the modern border with Canada.