Wisconsin place names with Anishinaabe roots
How Anishinaabe place names in Wisconsin can be used as clues for studying past environment and landscapes
Introduction
Names of places can be used as cultural artifacts as clues to understand how people lived in those places, much like relics dug up from archeological sites. Naming practices by Indigenous people often demonstrate how local environmental knowledge and cultural norms might have interacted. Place names can also provide information about past environments and land features that may not exist today due to various effects of human activities, and can, therefore, be used for passing on traditional Indigenous knowledge across time and space.
Long before Europeans came to the Great Lakes region, many Indigenous people lived, hunted, traded, and traveled through the land now known as Wisconsin. many lakes, rivers, villages and townships in Wisconsin were originally named by Indigenous people, and those are still used in Anglicized forms. Those names can provide us with clues about the plants and animals living in those places, how the land used to look like, and what the land was used for by the people living with the land.
Wisconsin's Name
“WISCONSIN: From an Indian name whose meaning is uncertain. Named after its principal river and said to mean "wild rushing channel;" also refers to "holes in the banks of a stream in which birds nest." Spelled Ouisconsin and Misconsing by early chroniclers.” Bureau of Indian Affairs ( https://www.bia.gov/as-ia/opa/online-press-release/origin-names-us-states ).
The state got the name after the 430-mile long river running through the state, allegedly called "Meskonsing" by Miami Indians. Some scholars (e.g., Davidson, 1935) argued that the original name is derived from ‘Mis-quh-seeng,’ which they contended, meant "place of Red Stone" from ‘Mis-quh,’ meaning ‘red,’ ‘ah-sin’ meaning ‘stone,’ and 'seeng’ signifying "region.
However, contemporary scholars including many native Anishinaabe speakers do not accept this explanation. They contend that the original meaning of the name "Wisconsin" came from “Wiishan-kong-Siin” or “Wiish-kong-siin”, which, in Ojibwe, means "Place of the Little Muskrat Lodge(s)." This interpretation reflects the wetland environments (the habitat of muskrats) around the river at the time the early Europeans were exploring the region. In the creation story of the Ojibwe People, the muskrat is credited to have dived to the bottom of flood water to bring up a tiny handful of soil from which new land grew.
Descriptive Anishinaabe Place Names
"So much geography there is in their names. The Indian navigator naturally distinguishes by a name those parts of a stream where he has encountered quick water and forks, and again, the lakes and smooth water where he can rest his weary arms, since those are the most interesting and more arable parts to him." Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods (1864).
