Kekionga was a great capital · and its name means ‘blackberry patch.’ — Famous Stories & the Record, Fort Wayne

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Famous Stories & the Record

KEKIONGA

The scale, with a definition attached: a cluster of villages, Miami, plus refugee Delaware and Shawnee by the 1790s, not one town. The 1744 census (~1,000 Miamians) and period descriptions of cornfields “as far as the eye can see” support “the largest Miami settlement, and the largest village of its kind in present-day Indiana.” Precise one-date populations in the thousands need a named census.

The etymology. The state marker itself hedges, “Tradition holds that Kekionga means ‘the blackberry patch’”, following J. P. Dunn, who already doubted it. Linguist Michael McCafferty's exhaustive 2008 examination dismissed Dunn's explanation and several others. Print it as tradition, not translation.

Sources: Kekionga marker, hmdb.org; McCafferty, Native American Place Names of Indiana (2008), via the Kekionga summary

The name itself, in its Miami-Illinois form, is written kiihkayonki. Dunn, who handed the city the “blackberry patch” tradition, also floated the possibility that the name was a corrupted or dialect form of Kiskakon or Kikakon, the Ottawa village name — one reason McCafferty's 2008 examination, the chapter “Trails to Kekionga” in Native American Place Names of Indiana, would not settle on any single derivation. The “capital” framing deserves the same care as the translation: Kekionga was the principal Miami town and the seat of their council fires in the period of the records, a cluster of villages at a portage that mattered to three empires — but “capital” is a European word laid over a Miami place, and this record uses it only inside the claim, as told.

Added source: Kekionga summary and notes, citing Dunn and McCafferty (2008)

Kekionga was a great capital · and its name means ‘blackberry patch.’

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