How did a state whose people were overwhelmingly African and Afro-Caribbean end up carrying an Amerindian word? Geggus notes that nobody recorded how the decision was reached, and works backward from what it ruled out.

An African name was never plausible. The enslaved spoke dozens of languages and no single homeland could have satisfied them all, while the officers who signed the declaration of 1804 were mostly colony-born and largely of mixed descent. Taino symbolism gave the new state an anchor outside both Europe and Africa, and suited a literate ex-free-colored group that now filled the administration.

Geggus is skeptical of the companion claim that Arawak language or ritual survived to be picked up in 1804. The island's native population had all but vanished by the 1550s, Boya was not a Taino remnant, and the chant long cited as Arawak turns out to be African. What he grants the name is staying power: it outlasted partition, monarchy and republic alike.