When it comes to memorialization, nothing beats a martyr—even when your culture has done the martyring. So it has seemed, anyway, in a nation where no fewer than twenty-six states—along with countless towns, sports teams, summer camps, and recreational vehicles—bear names meant to evoke those humans who came before. Between 1492 and the American Revolution, this continent’s indigenous populace declined from an estimated ten million to a tenth of that. One of the genocide’s lesser-known effects was linguistic. Perhaps a quarter of the earth’s languages in the fifteenth century, linguists say, were American. Lost to us now are millions of words, in thousands of tongues, that Natives used to describe the grasslands and gullies and peaks of the lands that they inhabited. And yet many settlers were keen on borrowing these words, even as they killed the people who coined them. Hundreds of proper names and place-words, or misconstruals thereof, were placed on old maps and remain on ours.
In New York, the first such word to be adopted by Europeans became the most famous one. In the fall of 1609, some weeks after Henry Hudson angled his ship through an inviting narrows, entered an expansive bay, and began exploring a broad river that would later be named for him, one of Hudson’s seamen wrote, in his log, that the river’s wooded east bank was known to the area’s natives as “Manna-hata.” These people, who spoke an Algonquian tongue called Munsee, had beat Hudson there by around a thousand years. Their forebears had left the Eurasian landmass some millennia earlier, striding over the Bering land bridge and gradually traversing the continent to reach its fecund eastern edge. They’d made their home in the deer-filled woods surrounding a sublime natural bay, whose depths teemed with fish and whose shallows breathed, at the start of the colonial era, with a billion oysters. In ensuing years, these people—along with their southerly cousins, who spoke a related but distinct Algonquian tongue, called Unami—came to be known as Delawares.