Older names

Twenty-four of the fifty current state names come from Native languages. Massachusetts, Connecticut, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, Utah, the Dakotas, Alaska and others were Native words before they were states. Most of them reached English through French or Spanish or another people's language, and a lot of them got bent on the way.

When we redrew the map, the states needed new names anyway, so we followed the same idea the rest of the way.

The rule

Every state is named for the people who lived there when Europeans arrived, or for a place in their language, written the way they write it where we could find that.

If a current name is a real word from the people who lived there, it stays, in their spelling. Minnesota becomes Mni Sota, the Dakota phrase it came from. Michigan becomes Mishigami. Kansas becomes Kaáⁿze, which is what the Kaw call themselves.

If a current name is a word borrowed from someone else's language, the people who were actually there get the name instead. Iowa is a name others gave the Ioway, who call themselves Báxoje, so that's the name. Wisconsin probably comes from a Miami-Illinois word, but the people Jean Nicolet met at Green Bay in 1634 were Ho-Chunk, so that state is Hoocąk.

Some names moved with their source. Ohio is a Seneca word for the river, the river starts at Pittsburgh, and so Ohi:yo' is the Pittsburgh state. Texas comes from the Caddo word for friend, and Caddo country is east Texas, so Táyshaʔ is the Dallas state.

What "at contact" means

Europeans reached different parts of the continent three centuries apart. Spanish ships were off Florida in the 1510s. The Columbia Plateau didn't see Europeans until Lewis and Clark in 1805. So "who was there at contact" means a different decade in almost every state, and in a few places, like the Ohio Valley, the answer changed a lot within a single lifetime as nations moved, merged and were pushed out.

We picked the people most closely tied to each state's land at the time Europeans started writing things down there. Where several nations shared a place, the state's page names all of them.

What we don't know

Some of these names were written down by outsiders and nothing better survives. Susquehannock, Timucua, Tocobaga, Ais and Tequesta are all names we have only from Spanish or English records. Some names are contested. Tongva is the most common name for the people of the Los Angeles basin, and some of their descendants prefer Kizh.

Spellings differ between communities and between writing systems. We used the forms the nations themselves use, or that current language programs use, wherever we could find them. We will get some of these wrong.

We don't speak for any of the nations on this map, and nobody should read it as if we do. If you're a member of one of them and something here is wrong, or a different name would be better, please tell us. We'll fix it.

This has been done before

Renaming places isn't a strange idea. It happens regularly.

In 2010 British Columbia renamed the Queen Charlotte Islands as Haida Gwaii, the islands of the people, at the Haida Nation's request. In 2020 the Minnesota Supreme Court upheld the state's decision to rename Lake Calhoun in Minneapolis as Bde Maka Ska, its Dakota name. In 2022 the Interior Department finished renaming about 650 places on federal land to remove a slur against Native women, after consulting with more than 70 tribes.

It doesn't always stick. Alaska asked in 1975 for the country's tallest mountain to be called by its Koyukon name, Denali. The federal government agreed in 2015. In 2025 an executive order changed it back to Mount McKinley, though the national park around it is still Denali National Park. Names are political. Ours are a suggestion on a map.