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THE READINGS, PRINTED WHOLE
The marsh's river carries the oldest name on this ground, and the readings of it conflict. The linguistic record, in Michael McCafferty's analysis (Names 52:4, 2004; Names 62:2, 2014), is that the name is Miami-Illinois teeyaahkiki — "open country," "exposed land," "land in open, land exposed to view" — a description of the marsh itself, recorded by La Salle in the early 1680s in the form "Téakiki" for the combined Illinois–Kankakee waterway, and distorted through three centuries of French and English spellings: the Kankakee Valley Historical Society's chain runs Ak-a-ki, Ti-ah-ke-kink, Kien-ki-ki, Au-ki-ki, Theas-ki-ki, Aue-que-que, Quin-qui-qui, before the name settled as Kankakee. The Society's own popular gloss — the Potawatomi's Au-ki-ki, "beautiful river" — prints beside McCafferty's as the competing reading the valley tells itself; the linguist's verdict, that the written form "Kankakee" as it stands has no meaning in the local languages and that the meaning rides in the Miami-Illinois original, governs this section's use. The name fits the ground it names either way it is read: an open country of water and grass, exposed to view for miles — the land The Land leg describes, in the words of the people who worked it first.
Sources: cited in the text throughout this section; the build's consolidated source record — with this section's citation practice measured — stands in the Sources leg.