ABSTRACT
Acer rubrum (red) ashak homeche [asaykhô:mî:cî] (ashak, acorn, home, bitter, che, little;
an allusion to a pestle made from red maple altering the taste of acorn meal, Mikasuki)
chukchu (Choctaw. Swanton 1931 wrote that mortars from them gave food a taste “sufficiently bad to ruin one’s stomach”)
cicig’me’wc (Ojibwa); cicigimé-wic (Potawatomi) héno (Muskogee); hinô [haino] (Creek, cf. Simmons [1822] 1973)
( squirrel, im, its, ittó, tree, hatká, white, Koasati)
plaine (plane tree, from Old French plasne from the 1300s, itself derived from Platanus because of the broad leaves, Quebec); plaine rouge (red plane tree, Quebec)
red [scarlet, soft, swamp] maple she-she-gum-maw-wis (sap flows fast, Ojibwa) yap sake’here (red tree, Catawba)
Acer saccharum (sugar) achsüñamihschi (achsüña, sugar, mihschi, tree, Delaware); a’nina’tig
[adjabubi’mi, inenatig, ininâtig, nin-au-tik] (migit, tree, nin, our, Ojibwa); inina’tig (our tree, Potawatomi); kisinamic [kisinamîc] (cold tree, Potawatomi); senamishi (cold timber, Meskwaki)
can-n’ (can, tree, n’, sap, Osage); jan-ni (Kansa, Omaha-Ponca); nanni (Iowa)
chan-ha son (chan-ha, bark, son, pale or whitish, Dakota); nan-sank (nan, wood, sank, real, genuine, Winnebago)
chukchu chito (chukchu, maple, chito, big, Choctaw); chukchu hapi champuli (chukchu, maple, hapi, salt, champuli, sweet, Choctaw)
érable a sucre (sugar maple, Quebec) [Caddo, chalk, Florida, hard, rock, striped, sugar, northern sugar]
maple o-loñ-da’ke’li’ (tree sap, Oneida); u-ren’-na’-kri (tree sap, Tuscarora) ta’niju’·ra (water wood, Winnebago) thenomeysee (Shawnee, fide Edgar 1891; mihschi, tree, is the Delaware
cognate for the second element) waronawoenta girhit (waronawoenta, sugar, girhit, tree, Onondaga) Zucherbaum (sugar tree, German); Zukerholz (sugar [maple] woods,
German)
Europeans had lived with maples their entire history, and none of their native species has ever been used to produce sugar (Cheatham et al. 1995). However, when Europeans arrived in the New World, they found indigenous people harvesting sap from maples and other genera to produce a sweet drink and to use in cooking (Henshaw 1890). Although it may be difficult to comprehend from the perspective of this century, with its immediate and cheap sources of sugar, maples were an important source of sweets to indigenous Americans. History notes that, to the indigenous people in Quebec, Acer saccharum “affords great quantities of a cooling and wholesome liquor from which they make a sort of sweet” (Jefferys 1760 in Hedrick 1919). The month of March to the Menomini was sho-bo-maw-kun-ka-zho (sugar moon).
