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When it comes to memorialization, nothing beats a martyr even when your culture has done the martyring. So it has seemed, anyway, in a nation where no fewer than twenty-six states along with countless towns, sports teams, summer camps, and recreational vehicles bear names meant to evoke those humans who came before. Between 1492 and the American Revolution, this continent’s indigenous populace declined from an estimated ten million to a tenth of that. One of the genocide’s lesser-known effects was linguistic. Perhaps a quarter of the earth’s languages in the fifteenth century, linguists say, were American. Lost to us now are millions of words, in thousands of tongues, that Natives used to describe the grasslands and gullies and peaks of the lands that they inhabited. And yet many settlers were keen on borrowing these words, even as they killed the people who coined them. Hundreds of proper names and place-words, or misconstruals thereof, were placed