Plant Names with Indigenous Origins

Many of our favorite plants have names that come from Indigenous languages. Have you ever thought about the origins of the words cocoa, tomato, or pecan?

First-contact communities were the first tribes to encounter European settlers centuries ago. To help colonists survive, Native people introduced the newcomers to the surrounding flora and fauna while identifying them in their Indigenous languages. The Europeans learned the Indigenous words and, over time, the English interpretations of these plant names became some of the words we use today.

Native peoples' knowledge was vital for Europeans’ survival. But there’s a catch. As European colonists and settlers thrived in the Americas, Native people were killed, forced to assimilate into mainstream culture, and forced to stop speaking their languages. Many first-contact languages haven’t been fluently spoken in generations.

Today, linguists use loanwords such as pasimenan or pakon to help reconstruct tribal languages that are no longer spoken. Written observations of native languages by Europeans, like John Smith and Roger Williams, are compared to spoken languages in the same family. Through this process, sounds, words, and sentence structures, can be reformulated.

When you say these plants’ names, whether you know it or not, you are recognizing their history. You are celebrating the cultures that had relationships with these plants. You are uplifting the people who nurtured and cultivated these plants. You are showing gratitude for the gifts that these plants provide. You are acknowledging how colonization has spread these plants across the world, and (in some cases) ignored their Indigenous history. And, you are reclaiming these plants’ origins.

Sources: @npr, @librarycongress, @merriamwebster, @smithsonianmagazine, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles by John Smith, A Key into the Language of America by Roger Williams, Lenape Talking Dictionary, The Ojibwe People’s Dictionary, Online Cree Dictionary, American Anthropologist, The Journal of American Folklore, Brown University, @unitednations, @librarycongress, @britannica, @umntwincities, @smithsonian, @marriamwebster, @universityofvermont, @eufic, @raoshomemade, @uofnm, @healthline, @webmd, @nihgov, @slowfoodusa, @mcgillu, @masterclass, @cambridgeuniversity, @uoregon, @forbes, @worldcocoafoundation, @dictionarycom, @gastronomicopop, @fao, @npr, @ucriversideofficial, @sbindependent, @bonappetitmag, @raoshomemade, Harvard Wired Humanities Projects, Ag in the Classroom: Louisiana, International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, American Indian Health and Diet Project, Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, Olam Nuts, Oxford Reference, Chile Ministry of Education, Peru Ministry of Foreign Trade and Tourism