The Research Store

The Language a thread through the store

One line of this research runs under all the rest: the valley's names are its oldest surviving record, and nearly every one is a plain description of the ground — worn smooth by foreign mouths until its meaning went silent inside a spelling.

The nations of the Maumee wrote nothing down. What they left on the country was spoken — the names they laid on the water and the rock and the rapids — and those names proved harder to kill than the towns. The takers wanted the country, and found they wanted the names too, and kept them, mostly without knowing what it was they kept. So the map of northwest Ohio is, quietly, a dictionary of a language the people who read it every day can no longer hear.

Read the names back into their own tongues and the ground starts speaking. Almost none are labels; they are descriptions, and a few are jobs:

Wabash

waapaahšiiki — it shines white: the clear water over a white limestone bed

Maumee

Myaamia — the downstream people: the Miami's name for themselves, by way of French and Odawa mouths

Shawnee

Shawano — the Southerners: the people of the south quarter of the world

Ottawa

Odawa — to trade: the merchants of the lakes

Potawatomi

keepers of the fire: the youngest brother of the Three Fires

Tippecanoe

kiteepihkwana — the place of the buffalo fish

Kekionga

kiihkayonki — the blackberry patch: the Miami capital Fort Wayne stands on

Sandusky

saandusti — cold water, or water within the water

Auglaize

aux glaises — at the clay licks, in a French coat

Erie

the wildcat nation, destroyed in the Iroquois wars — the lake their only monument

Every one of the valley's tongues — Miami-Illinois, Shawnee, Odawa, Ojibwe, Potawatomi, Delaware — belonged to a single family, Algonquian. It is part of why a confederacy of many nations could cohere at all; and it is why the same family's words still furnish English much of its common speech (moose, moccasin, wigwam, pecan) and half its inland map (Mississippi, Illinois, Michigan). The language the ledger wrote over is spoken, unremarked, by the country that wrote it.

And the record has a dark root and a living answer. The earliest writings-down of these tongues were taken at the moment of their dispossession — 404 Shawnee words elicited by an army officer at Fort Finney in 1786, during the treaty that stripped the Shawnee of their lands; a fuller vocabulary collected in Kansas in the 1840s, a thousand miles from the valley, after removal. The words survived because the people were displaced. And from exactly that paper — the mission dictionaries, the agents' word-lists — the Myaamia and the Shawnee are now raising their languages back up, teaching their children the true shapes of the names. The ledger wrote over the country down to the vowels; and the vowels, it turns out, were only waiting.

Follow it through the store: the names · Wabash · Myaamia · Algonquian · the Three Fires · Fort Finney