Here are the only words I know so far in the Algonquian language, which, by the way, is extinct:

Moosiap, raccoon, squash, succotash, opossum, wigwam, wampum.

Of course there are others, and a ton of place names, like "Massachusetts" just for one. But the language is gone. It was never a written or printed language, and not many colonists bothered to try to learn it. There was one notable exception, and his name was John Eliot.

His considerable feat was to translate the bible (Old and New Testaments) into the language of the Massachusett Indian. If you can believe this: he was helped by a translator named Sassamon (a Wampanoag from Massachusetts Bay), whose murder marked the start of King Philip's War! This all gets a bit tangled.

Sassamon was a friend to the Americans, to Eliot, and later, a friend to King Philip. John Eliot wanted to learn Sassamon's Massachusett language, but not strictly to make communication easier. Eliot had his eye on conversion. Heathens again. They were bloody everywhere. The prize would have been to convert King Philip, sachem of a large contingent of Indians. (In case I haven't mentioned it before, Philip was really named Metacom, but the colonists called him King Philip.)

So Sassamon helped Eliot learn his language, while Eliot helped Sassamon with his English, and in the end, the colony got a Massachusett-language bible, and Eliot got Sassamon into Harvard. Eliot printed 2000 bibles in 1663, 1 bible for every 2.5 Indians. Hmmm. A bit grandiose, no? Strangely, there are almost none left. The only one I know of it in Harvard's Houghton Library.

(It was later -- ten years later -- that Sassamon tried to warn the colonists that the unconvertable Metacom (Philip) was becoming resentful of the pressure to become Christian, the pressure to give up good land, and the general clacking about of the Ugly new Americans. No one wanted to hear any of it, whether in English or in Massachusett. Sassamon was murdered and thrown in an icy pond. But all that is part of another story.)

The thing is, here they all were in Massachusetts, with 2000 Indian language bibles circulating around, and god knows how many English bibles, and the whacked Americans shouting about penitents and piety, trying to Christianize the Indians, and nobody even reads! Even the Americans were half illiterate. John Eliot had to drag over a printing press from London just to set up the printing of the Indian bible.

But it was a considerable feat, wasn't it? A whole book in the native tongue. And all I know is that raccoon and succotash are pretty cool words. And that that bible helped start a big war.