Geggus asks how a state whose people were African and Afro-American came to take a Taino word for its name in 1804, and works through the possibilities in turn. An African name is ruled out on linguistic and demographic grounds; the Fon word for earth does not fit the vowel, and no single African group was large enough to supply a name the rest would accept. Claims that Arawak communities or chants survived into the late colonial period fail once the sources are traced: the famous Arawak vodou chant is African, and the supposed Taino village of Boya was Maya and mestizo. What remains is print. Geggus follows the word through Peter Martyr, Pane, Las Casas, Moreau de Saint-Mery and an 1799 novel that made Hispaniola's natives Peruvian, which explains the insurgents' brief self-naming as Incas. Educated free colored officers around Dessalines supplied the name; scattered petroglyphs and burials made it meaningful to everyone else.