Winnetka, Land of Mystery

A friend of mine has become obsessed with Winnetka, the name of a main street and town in our corner of the county, since he heard it was a Native American word meaning “beautiful land” and after it became the freeway exit to his home. Since the same freeway used to be a passageway for the Chumash Indians, he also wondered if “winnetka” might be Chumash. Being a fan of place names and etymology myself, I thought it would be fun to look into it.

It turns out Winnetka’s origins aren’t local at all, but rather in Illinois, where the town of Winnetka was incorporated in 1869. Beyond that there doesn’t seem to be any solid consensus on anything. The Winnetka Historical Society attributes the word to a Native American phrase meaning “beautiful land” that town founder Charles Peck’s wife Sarah supposedly read in a book, adding that “the source of this phrase has never been discovered.”

A dubious Wikipedia entry citing the WHS posits that “no language has been found with a word anything resembling both Winnetka and the definition.” The Village of Winnetka website states as fact that it’s a Native American word meaning “beautiful land.” The Encyclopedia Brittanica entry hedges, saying the word is “thought” to be derived from a Native American dialect.

Only the L.A. Times cites an actual tribe, claiming in a 1998 town profile that Winnetka is a Potawatomi word for “beautiful place,” an idea also put forth (and possibly derived from) an entry on MSN’s Encarta that says “probably.” (And yes, that’s the same Potawatomi Indians immortalized in the Tigers of Instantaneous Death song “Dowagiac.”)

That’s plausible, since the Potawatomi were known to live in Illinois (Winnetka is 10 miles away from the Potawatomi Woods). They could also be found in Kansas, and the Kansas Heritage Group’s helpful Potawatomi Dictionary translates “beauty” and “earth” (the closest thing I could find to “beautiful land”) as “we’onuk kik.” We’onuk-kik. Winnetka. Hmmm.

Then there’s UCLA Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Anthropology William Bright, who states rather professorially in his book “Native American Placenames of the United States”: “The name is apparently an artificial coinage from elements in various Algonquian languages, including SNEng [sic]. Algonquian ‘beautiful’ (Vogel 1963). The placename also occurs in Calif. (Los Angeles, CA) and Minnesota (Hennepin Co.).”

So which is it? Potawatomi? Multiple Algonquian? Sarah Peck’s pidgin Indian? Unsourceable? Beautiful land? Magnificent feast? More importantly, how can so many different takes on the origin of one word co-exist in an authoritative context? It seems that not only is the erosion of truth inevitable but insurmountable.

UPDATE: Thanks to an anonymous reader for the following additional info:

Wenet- means it is good looking. Ka could come from ke- earth or sometimes pronounced ki-
ki with a k means at on or near a location. It is called locative.

In Potawatomi there is an animate or living word and inanimate non living word for most things. So Wenet- is is inanimate while wenze- he/she is beautiful.

Wenek- is a different form of the same word.