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The Origin of the Names of the Great Lakes
Lake Ontario Ontario is one of the ten provinces and three territories that make up Canada. The Hurons or Wyandot or Wendat, as they called themselves, named Lake Ontario first. Later the province took its name from the lake. In the Wendat tongue, Ontario means ‘large lake,’ but other Iroquoian languages like Mohawk have possible root words also, like onitariio ‘beautiful lake’ and kanadario ‘shining water.’ The name was first applied to the lake in 1641. Later European settlers gave the name to the land along the lakeshore and then to an ever extending area. “Old Ontario” was a term sometimes loosely applied to the southern portion of the province.
Lake Erie Lake Erie takes its label from a tribe of Amerindians who once lived on the south shore of the lake. Their totem animal was the bobcat. They wore a bobcat tail as a ceremonial head-dress. Erie means ‘long-tailed’ in their Iroquoian language. Now, I don't want to be catty, but in fact the bobcat has rather a short tail compared to its fellow felines. On the Niagara Peninsula and Niagara Escarpment of the north shore of Lake Erie in what became Canada dwelt roving bands of the so-called Neutral people including the Erie People. Early French explorers dubbed Lake Erie Lac du Chat ‘Cat Lake.’ Lake Huron Paddling toward the origin of the name of Lake Huron, we touch shore in Old French where une hure meant a shock of hair. It also meant the head of an animal, and then was applied to any human head that was animal-like. An augmentative suffix is something one adds to the end of a word to make the root meaning bigger. A common augmentative in Romance languages is -on. For example, in Spanish, hombre means man. Now add -on, to get hombron, which means a big man, a stud, a real bruiser. Thus sixteenth-century French has huron, the augmentative of hure ‘a big clump of hair.’ In older French it could mean also a wild boar, or a bumpkin, a gross lout who never cut his hair. A North American legend says a French soldier saw a group of Indians with their hair shaved on the side and long on top in what we would today call a mohawk, but in what that French soldier or explorer called huron because it was bristly like the hair on a wild boar’s head. Dean Snow, the head of anthropology at Penn State University, states that often it wasn't even real hair—it was almost a Mohawk toupée.
ceremonial deer roach “A lot of male Indians would wear deer roaches that look like what we call a mohawk,” he says. “It's deer hair and a piece of hide: the external skin of the tail with the hair attached. It could be stained or dyed red. So it looks like hair, but it's not.” The word roach as used here is problematical too. American anthropologists borrowed it from horse grooming! In American English of the late eighteenth century, to roach a horse's mane meant to clip it short so that the hairs of the mane stood on end. It is done still with show horses and for equestrian performances. Early in the nineteenth century, barbers borrowed the term from the grooming stable and then a roach cut for humans was what we today would call a brush cut. But the linguistic truth, which cannot be fudged by Jesuit historical revisionism, is that Huron was a derogatory, racist epithet that meant “the lout.” The name Huron was applied to a confederation of some Iroquoian tribes that once inhabited the area between Georgian Bay and Lake Simcoe, quite early called Huronia. Huron was a French label, never one used by the confederacy. Their own name for their people was Wendat ‘island dwellers,’ either because of the many lakes and rivers with islands in Huronia, or because in their mythology the earth is one vast island resting on the carapace of the primordial turtle. Compare the name of Awenda Provincial Park in Ontario. When they fled their Iroquois enemies in the seventeenth century, they were called Wyandot, a variant pronunciation of Wendat. In 1615 when Samuel de Champlain and his crew of fur-seekers, a missionary priest, and adventurers, first saw Huronia, they found, though they did not recognize it, an expertly balanced economy among the Wendat that included fortified villages and cleared land for agriculture with three stable food crops: corn, beans, and squash, being deftly grown at the northern limit of their botanical range in North America. Lake Michigan Lake Michigan takes it name from Algonkian roots, a Chippewan word meicigama that means ‘big lake,’ akin to Fox me
Lake Superior Folk wisdom says the deepest, vastest, coldest of the Great Lakes was named for “superior” fishing. Nice try, fly guys! It is superior to the other great lakes on the map, that is, the most northwesterly. The explorer Étienne Brûlé was perhaps the first European to see the lake and may have named it. The English name is a translation of Lac Supérieur.
Sunset over Lake Superior
© 2009 William Gordon Casselman
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ikami ‘large lake.’ Many other Canadian and northern American place names contain both roots. Meici, missi, mitchi are variants of the same root and they all mean big in various Amerindian languages. Think of the Big River, the Mississippi (sipi ‘river’). Ontarians will know Temagami ‘deep lake,’ a geographical name that contains the Algonkian root gam- or kam- ‘lake.’ 
