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Many of these "loan words" are nouns from the Algonquian languages that were once widespread along the Atlantic coast. English colonists, encountering unfamiliar plants and animals—among them moose, opossum, and skunk—borrowed Indian terms to name them. Pronunciations generally changed, and sometimes the newcomers shortened words they found difficult; for instance, "pocohiquara" became "hickory."

Some U.S. English Words with Indian Origins:

anorak                from the Greenlandic Inuit "annoraq"

bayou                 from the Choctaw "bayuk"

chipmunk             from the Ojibwa "ajidamoon," red squirrel

hickory               from the Virginia Algonquian "pocohiquara"

hominy                from the Virginia Algonquian "uskatahomen"

igloo                   from the Canadian Inuit "iglu," house

kayak                 from the Alaskan Yupik "qayaq"

moccasin             from the Virginia Algonquian

moose                 from the Eastern Abenaki "mos"

papoose             from the Narragansett "papoos," child

pecan                  from the Illinois "pakani"

powwow             from the Narragansett "powwaw," shaman

quahog                from the Narragansett "poquauhock"

squash                from the Narragansett "askutasquash"

succotash          from the Narragansett "msickquatash," boiled corn

tepee                  from the Sioux "tipi," dwelling

toboggan             from the Micmac "topaghan"

tomahawk          from the Virginia Algonquian "tamahaac"

totem                  from the Ojibwa "nindoodem," my totem

wampum             from the Massachusett "wampumpeag"

wigwam             from the Eastern Abenaki "wik'wom" Natives.

Population

While the Indian population was never dense, the idea that the Indian has held his own, or even actually increased in number, is a serious error, founded on the fact that most official estimates begin with the federal period, when the native race was already wasted by nearly three centuries of white contact and in many regions entirely extinct. An additional source of error is that the law recognizes anyone of even remote Indian ancestry as entitled to Indian rights, including in this category, especially in the former "Five Civilized Nations" of Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), several thousand individuals whose claims have always been stoutly repudiated by the native tribal courts. Moreover, the original Indian was a full-blood, while his present-day representative has often so little aboriginal blood as to practically a white man or a negro. Many broken tribes of today contain not a single full-blood, and some few not even one of half Indian blood. The Cherokee Nation, officially reported to number 36,000 persons of pure or mixed Cherokee blood contains probably not 4000 of even fairly pure blood, the rest being all degrees of admixture even down to one-sixty-fourth or less of Indian blood, besides some 7000 claimants officially recognized, but repudiated by the former Indian Government. In Massachusetts an official census of 1860 reported a "Yartmouth tribe" of 105 persons, all descended from a single Indian woman with a negro husband residing there in 1797. It is obvious that the term Indian cannot properly be applied to such diluted mixtures.

The entire aboriginal population of Florida, of the mission period, numbering perhaps 30,000, is long since extinct without descendants, the Seminole being a later emigrations from the Creeks. The aborigines of South Carolina, counting in 1700 some fifteen tribes of which the Catawba, the largest tribe, numbered some six thousand souls, are represented today by about a hundred mixed blood Catawba, together with some scattered mongrels, whose original ancestry is a matter of doubt.

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