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Other common names: arrowhead, duck potato, flèche d'eau, tule, wapata
Genus: Sagittaria < sagitta Latin, arrow. Leaves shaped like an arrowhead give this plant its name.
The Latin word for arrow hits the target in another familiar word Sagittarius, the sign of the zodiac that is the archer in Latin, referring originally to the constellation.
The arrowhead plant family is found chiefly in freshwater streams and swamps in temperate and tropical regions of the northern hemisphere. The two common species in Canada are the more southerly Sagittaria latifolia with its lata folia or broad leaves, and the more northerly Sagittaria cuneata with cuneate or wedge-shaped leaves.
The obliging little duck potato, tuber of Sagittaria latifolia, floats to the surface of ponds when ripe where it can be collected by animals and man.
Arrowhead tubers grow in the muddy guck of shallow streams and marshes across Canada, where wild geese, ducks, beavers, and muskrats chomp them with gusto. Observing the animals feasting on tubers, native peoples found wapatoo could provide good food even in the winter. Adult aboriginal people used digging sticks to harvest arrowhead tubers, but children jumped into the streams and found tubers by squishing them between toes in the warm muck and yanking them loose. Wapatoo was then boiled or roasted in hot ashes.Wapatoo is a word in Chinook Jargon, borrowed from an Algonkian language where wap/wab is the root signifying the colour white. Wapatoo means ‘white food’ or specifically, if from Cree, it may contain the root for mushroom that appears in wapatowa ‘white mushroom.’
Wab and Wap Words
Wabamun is a place in central Alberta whose name is the Cree word for mirror, literally 'white glass.'
Wampum is short for wamp-umpeag 'white strings' of beads made from shells for decorative and monetary use. Its roots are wap 'white' + umpe 'string.'
Wapiti is Cree for 'elk.' Compare Cree wapita 'it's white!' referring to the elk's white-furred rump.
Wapun means 'dawn' in Cree, that is, the white time of the day, when the sky whitens or lightens. An eastern Canadian people are called the Abenaki. But their real name is Wabanakiyak 'people of the dawn, of the east.'
Wapus or wabus means rabbit, that is, the white animal. Hence Wabasso™ linen and the place in Labrador West District called Wabush which in the Naskapi language means 'place of rabbits.'
© 2007 William Gordon Casselman
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