Braiding Sweetgrass for Young Adults: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
friend studying for an exam and saying Look it's studying That would be rude But that is how we speak of other beings such as plants animals and the earth herself I think that is no mistake English is the language of capitalism capitalism It's the language of objects And subtly or maybe not so subtly subtly it gives us permission to think about the world as our own property property where we can do whatever we want It puts the earth outside of our circle of compassion and care because it's just stuff In Potawatomi and many other Indigenous languages it is not possible to speak of living beings as it Sure we still have words for objects desk tractor phone but they do not describe anything living Objects made by humans are inanimate Indigenous Indigenous languages have their own grammar of respect which I refer to as the grammar of animacy We use words to address the living world just as we use for our family Because they are our family Many of us feel deeply uncomfortable calling the living world it and yet we don't have an alternative other than he she or they I began to wonder if there were ways to bring animacy into the English language I asked my Potawatomi language teacher about this and if we have a word for a living being Not a thing a being He said Yeah we have a beautiful word bimaadizi aki Earth life an earth being I knew that bimaadizi aki would not slip easily into English but ki does Ki describes a being To make it plural add an n making it kin So when the geese fly overhead we can say Kin are flying flying south for the winter they'll come back soon Every time we speak of the living world these pronouns allow us to embody our relatedness to them Our connection to them capitalism an economic system in which resources and means of production are privately owned and prices production and the distribution of goods are determined mainly by competition in a free market BRAIDING SWEETGRASS FOR YOUNG ADULTS
While I have some hesitation hesitation about using a word inspired by the Potawatomi language as I don't in any way want to engage in cultural appropriation I am proposing ki as a new pronoun A way of remembering our connection connection and responsibilities to the earth and all living beings I'm learning just how widely ki is used in languages around the world Often referring to life energy it is also an alternate pronunciation for chi life force or life energy In French qui is the word for who In Spanish it is quien The grammar of animacy extends beyond the characteristics of the living beings you may be learning about in biology For example ki includes rocks mountains water and fire As well as beings that are imbued with spirit like our sacred medicines and drums Even stories are animate kin our relatives all living beings cultural appropriation the disrespectful and unacknowledged adoption of a part of culture or identity by members of another culture or identity A grammar of animacy could lead us to completely new ways of living in the world A world with an equality of species not a domination of one A world where we have relationships with and a responsibility to water and wolves and one another A world that recognizes the importance of other species It's all in the pronouns TREATMENT OF INDIGENOUS LANGUAGES The Potawatomi and Anishinaabe languages are a reflection of the land and the people They are a living oral tradition which had not been written down in their long history until fairly recently A number of writing systems have emerged to try to capture the language in regularized orthography but there is no firm agreement on the preeminence of any one among the many variants of a large and living language Potawatomi elder fluent AN INVITATION TO REMEMBER
speaker and teacher Stewart King has kindly sorted through my rudimentary use of the language confirming meanings and advising on consistency in spelling and usage I am most appreciative for his guidance in my understanding of language and culture The Fiero system's double vowel orthography for writing the language has been widely adopted by many Anishinaabe speakers Most Potawatomi however known as the vowel droppers do not use Fiero With respect for speakers and teachers with these different perspectives I have tried to use the words in the way that they were originally given to me ON INDIGENOUS STORIES I am a listener and I have been listening to stories told around me for longer than I care to admit I mean to honor my teachers by passing on the stories that they have passed on to me and have done my best to give credit to who and where those stories came from We are told that stories are living beings they grow they develop they remember and they change not in their essence but sometimes in their dress They are shared and shaped by the land the culture and the teller One story may be told widely and differently Sometimes only a fragment is shared showing just one face of a many faceted story depending on its purpose So it is with the stories shared here Traditional stories are the collective treasures of a people and can't easily be attributed with a literature citation to an individual source Many are not to be publicly shared and these I have not included but many are freely disseminated so that they may do their work in the wider world For these stories which exist in many versions I have chosen to cite a published source as a reference while acknowledging that the version I share has been enriched by hearing it multiple times in different tellings For BRAIDING SWEETGRASS FOR YOUNG ADULTS
some I do not know of a published source for a story passed on in the oral tradition Chi megwech to the storytellers TREATMENT OF PLANT NAMES We accept without question that the names of people are capitalized capitalized To write george washington would be to strip that man of his special status as a human It would be laughable to write Mosquito if it were in reference to a flying insect but acceptable if we were discussing a brand of boat Capitalization conveys a certain distinction the elevated position of humans and their creations in the hierarchy of beings Biologists have widely adopted the convention of not capitalizing capitalizing the common names of plants and animals unless they include the name of a human being or an official place name Thus the first blossoms of the spring woods are written as bloodroot and the pink star of a California woodland is Kellogg's tiger lily This seemingly trivial grammatical rulemaking in fact expresses deeply held assumptions about human exceptionalism that we are somehow somehow different and indeed better than the other species who surround surround us Indigenous ways of understanding recognize the personhood personhood of all beings as equally important not in a hierarchy but a circle So in this book as in my life I break with those grammatical blinders to write freely of Maple Heron and Wally when I mean a person human or not and of maple heron and human when I mean a category or concept What is your first memory of being connected to all living beings AN INVITATION TO REMEMBER
