There are only about a thousand words in English—a mere 0.2% of the total vocabulary—that derive from the indigenous languages of the U.S. and Canada. This small number of words might have been greater had it not been for Tisquantum, a member of the Pawtuxet tribe that once thrived at what is now Plymouth. Tisquantum’s adventures began in 1605 when he was kidnapped by English explorers and taken to London, where he learned English. After he returned to New England in 1619, he discovered that his entire tribe had been wiped out by disease. As a result, when the Pilgrims arrived one year later, the “orphaned” Tisquantum took up with them, serving as their translator when trading with neighbouring tribes. By helping them, Tisquantum may have diminished the Pilgrims’ need to learn the indigenous names of animals and plants. Instead, these early settlers had the luxury of being able to adapt their own language to suit the things they found in their new environment; for example, rather than use the local indigenous name for a tall plant that grew large cobs of yellow seeds, they instead dubbed it Indian corn. The number of Native American loan words diminished even further after 1640, when American settlers and Native tribes stopped talking and instead began to massacre one another. Nonetheless, English did manage to adopt some indigenous words over the last four hundred years, including a few food-related ones. For example, quahog derives from what that Atlantic clam was called in Narraganset, poquauhock. The pone of cornpone arose from the original Algonquian name for that bread, appoans. From the Cree pasiminan comes persimmon, a tree that bears an orange-red fruit. On the Pacific coast, the Salish name for a kind of salmon—suk-kegh—was transformed to sockeye. The new spelling invoked two familiar English words—sock and eye—despite the fact that there is nothing socklike about that fish’s eye.