Haiti

The Taíno people who inhabited the western portion of the island called it Ayiti, meaning land of high mountains. The island's terrain justified the name: the Massif du Nord, the Massif de la Selle, and the Massif de la Hotte divide the landscape into steep ridges and narrow valleys. Columbus arrived in December 1492 and named the island La Española, which became Hispaniola in English. The French half, colonized from the 1620s onward, was known as Saint-Domingue.

Saint-Domingue became the most profitable colony in the Americas by the eighteenth century, producing roughly forty percent of Europe's sugar and more than half its coffee by the 1780s. That wealth was built entirely on enslaved African labor: by 1789, the colony held around 500,000 enslaved people alongside 40,000 white colonists and 30,000 free people of color. The Haitian Revolution began in 1791 when Dutty Boukman led an uprising in the northern province. Thirteen years of war followed.

When Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared independence on January 1, 1804, he deliberately chose the Taíno name Hayti for the new nation. The choice was a rejection of Hispaniola, of Saint-Domingue, of the colonial naming that had erased indigenous memory. The Taíno themselves had been largely wiped out by disease and violence within fifty years of Columbus's arrival. Dessalines was restoring a name to a people who could no longer use it.

Haiti is the only country in the Americas whose name is entirely indigenous in origin and was chosen by its founders as an act of political memory. France demanded 150 million francs in reparations for the colony's lost value, a debt Haiti paid until 1947. The mountainous land the Taíno named kept its name through colonization, revolution, and a debt that lasted 143 years.