A good number of articles give a "Native American word" as part of an etymology. This usually this appears in the etymology of a place name (Toponym) for a place in the United states. Sometimes other phrasing is used to communicate the same idea, e.g. "Indian word", or "Indigenous word", however "Native American word" seems to be the most popular.
There is no Native American language. The languages spoken in the United States prior to the genocide of indigenous peoples were very diverse, including many families and language isolates. Many of these languages still survive, still representing a great diversity. For comparison over 90% of Europeans are a native speaker of a lanuge from the Indo-European language family. "Native American" as a category of languages makes sense only from a modern political perspective, not from a linguistic or cultural one.
This fact alone means that these etymologies need clarification. It is simply too vague.
Additionally this, intentionally or not, presents a number of false impressions about indigenous cultures, languages and peoples. It presents indigenous languages as uniform and interchangable, and indigenous peoples as existing only in the past.
When I see this sort of language used I seek to fix it. Ideally I'd find the language and the word (in the language's orthography) and fill in the details. So first I check for a source and try to find these things. Sometimes there is a source, but usually the source mirrors the language of the article. If there is no source I add Template:Citation neededand a Template:Clarify. If there are sources, but they don't resolve the issue, I will try following their sources, until I find answers or the chain dries up. If I can't find a source I add Template:Clarify.
Here's what I use by default:
{{clarify|reason="Native American" is not a language. This text should specify the actual language of origin|date=November 2024}}
If I find partial answers or clues, I still leave the clarify but try to put something in the talk page as a trace.
The source references both "Delaware Indians" and "Kickapoo Indians", that suggest an Algonquian language. It overall treats all Indian groups as interchangeable. It is likely a poor source given this, and if the toponym is indeed from an indigenous language, it could be Osage, Kickapoo or Munsee. Article says "possible", however clarification is still possible.
I searched for other places with the same name and managed to find a source specifying Delaware languages. It would be nice to be more specific down to a language, however this is good enough for now.
It was easy to infer from context that the language being discussed was Cherokee. However digging into the sources this etymology begins to seem suspect. There are a bunch of sources backing the claim, but none of them are high quality. None seem to be written by people with knowledge of the Cherokee language, rather local historians, realtors and the like. I found Chenocetah's Weblog, which although self-published is written by someone who clearly has knowledge of the language, which claims the popular etymology is false. It states that the name originates from Muscogee and arrived in English via Cherokee. The page Nottely River repeats this alternate etymology with further detail, although I can't find a source for that further claim.
Overall the "daring horseman" etymology reeks of fabrication, but I can't find good sourcing. I updated the article to include the alternate etymology, but added a request for better sourcing.
Algoma appears to have a variety of etymologies, however only one is problematic. Dozens of low-quality sources state that it means "valley of flowers" (or similar) in an unspecified language. The fact that it appears in such disparate locations as Wisconsin and Mississippi makes it difficult to make any sort of guess. In my view its a very suspicious etymology, and may be fabricated.
In the Algoma, Wisconsin article it also states that in Menominee the name of the town translates to "snowshoe", while the placename article lists an etymology for algoma deriving from terms meaning "snowshoe". Which is odd.
This article has two "Indian words". Looking through sources I was able to find the etymology of the place name, and the one in the article appears to have been a fabrication. It had some suspicious qualities to it to begin with, no source, and now I have a source contradicting it. So I removed it and added a bit of sourced info.
