Searching for the Meaning of Iowa: Word Roots, Prairie Roots (Blog)

There is a brochure myth that the word Iowa, derived from the Ioway Indian tribe, means “the beautiful land.” Government road maps for Iowa once exclaimed, “Welcome to Iowa! ‘The Beautiful Land!’” This myth goes back to at least the late nineteenth-century. In a short book on the history of Cedar Falls, published in 1893, Peter Melendy writes:

Iowa, in the expressive language of the aborigines… is said to signify, “The beautiful land,” and seems to have been given by a tribe of Sac and Fox [Sauk and Meskwaki] Indians, who looking across the Mississippi River at Rock Island exclaimed, “Iowa! Iowa!! This is the place, ‘The beautiful land.’”

Melendy expresses some uncertainty on the meaning of Iowa and one wonders if he was even aware of the Ioway tribe. Through the Indian Removal Acts of the early nineteenth-century, the Ioway had been absent from their homelands for over fifty years when Melendy published his book. Even if Iowa did mean “the beautiful land,” a member of the Ioway tribe from the early nineteenth-century would recognize little of Iowa as it now stands.

So what does Iowa mean?

The way to the meaning of the word Iowa is through the Ioway. Ioway is the French transcription of Ayuway, which is what the Illini and Meskwaki called the tribe. The roots of this word only get more twisted. Ayuway is actually an alteration of what the Dakota called the tribe: Ayuxba (AH-you-khbah), which is believed to mean “sleepy ones.” Ayuxba to Iowa: the “sleepy ones.”

The Ioway tribe do not refer to themselves as the Ioway, but Baxoje (BAH-kho-jay), a name believed to come from what the Otoe called the tribe. The Otoe and Ioway sometimes camped with one another. Once, the Ioway camp was covered in ashy snow. The Otoe called the group baxoje, “grey snow” or “ashy snow-heads.”

Recovering the roots of the word Iowa is a lot like recovering the roots of the land itself. Driving on the interstate or county roads, past row after row of corn and soybeans, we witness one of the most ecologically transformed places in the world. Glimpsing the roots of this transformed land often means a lot of twists and turns on the road. And it always means getting off the road, out of the car, and walking into the prairie.

Prairie. We are not only in an intricate weave of grasses and flowers, but, once again, in a complex weave of words and history.

The word prairie comes from the first group of Europeans to witness the upper Midwest, the French. In French, prairie refers to a meadow or a pasture, something much tamer than what the French Jesuits and trappers encountered: grass standing taller than a man on a horse and stretching as far as the eye could see. There was nothing in that vast interpenetrating lexicon of European languages, no natural reference points in eastern America or Europe, that compared to the unique grasslands of middle America.

Native prairie, specifically tall grass prairie, covered the majority of Iowa, an estimated 70 to 80 percent. It now covers less than one tenth of one percent.

We have lost the prairie to the cattle and plow, and we continue to lose the soils to irresponsible farming practices over the last hundred or more years. We now know the prairie through traces in a ditch, a natural buffer along the boundaries of a small farm, and fragments in state parks, restorations, and preserves.

The loss of the tall grass prairie is like the loss of a language. The prairie is a form of knowledge that teaches us how to live in this place. Prairie teaches the necessity of biodiversity, of strong tough roots that hold on to soil rather than sending it downstream.

The Ioway called the prairie tanji. Changes in the prairie landscape provided the names of the summer months. The translation of June is “little flowers;” July, “big flowers.” The Ioway also had numerous names and expressions to describe different ways of walking through tanji.

There is an Ioway story which involves Ishjinki, a Trickster character. While it refers to the native woodland communities of Iowa, and not prairie, the story is still instructive. It depicts the unique native tree communities of Iowa. If we were to travel to the Ozark Mountains in Missouri or the Boundary Waters in Minnesota, we would have a different story.

In the story, Ishjinki falls into a pile of excrement and his eyes are glued shut and blinded:

He went along until he bumped into a tree and asked, ‘What kind of tree are you?’ The tree replied, ‘An oak’ (Butu). So Ishjinki said, ‘Oh, I know where you grow, on the dry highlands.’ He went on to another, and asked what it was. It replied, ‘A walnut’ (Toku). He proceeded until he came to another tree and asked it what kind of tree it was. It said, ‘An elm’ (Ehu). ‘Oh,’ said Ishjinki, ‘you’re near the bank.’ He went on and came to another and inquired what that was. It replied, ‘Hackberry’; then he came to the cottonwood (Baxre). ‘Oh you are right on the bank,’ said Ishjinki. He went on and came to another and asked what it was. It said, ‘Willow’ (Uxristun’a). ‘Oh,’ said Ishjinki, ‘I am at the water’s edge,’ and he leaped right into the water and washed his eyes open. (quoted in Foster, 1999)

Whether he is tearing the feathers off of the Buzzard's head or stealing the garments of the Rabbit, other stories show that Ishjinki is bound to get into more trouble. But here, Ishjinki is nature literate. Perhaps the trees “speak” to him through the unique intricacies of bark. By knowing where the trees grow, Ishjinki is not blind to his place. His knowledge of nature guides him to a clarity of vision.

He can see through the excrement.

(To learn more about the Ioway Nation, visit: http://ioway.nativeweb.org/index.htm All references to the Ioway tribe are indebted to the work of Lance Foster, a member of the Ioway tribe. For more, see Foster’s Indians of Iowa [2009] and his essay, “Tanji na Che: Recovering the Landscape of the Ioway” in the collection, Recovering the Prairie [1999].)