by Robin Wall Kimmerer

I come here to listen, to nestle in the curve of the roots, in a soft hollow of pine needles. To lean my bones against the column of white pine, to turn off the voice in my head until I can hear the voices outside it. The shh of the wind in the needles. Water trickling over rock, nuthatch tapping, chipmunks digging, beechnut falling, mosquito in my ear and something more, something which is not for me, for which we have no language, the wordless being of others in which we are never alone. After the drumbeat of my mother's heart, this was my first language.

I could spend a whole day listening. And a whole night. And in the morning, without my hearing it, there might be a mushroom that was not there the night before, creamy white, pushed up from the pine needle duff, out of darkness to light, still glistening with the fluid of its passage. Puhpowee.

This is the grammar of animacy. Imagine, seeing your grandmother standing there at the stove in her apron and then saying "Look, it is making soup. It has gray hair." We might snicker at such a mistake, but recoil from it also. In English, we never refer to a member of our family as "it", or indeed any other person. Such grammar would be a profound act of disrespect. "It" robs a person of selfhood and kinship, reducing a person to a mere "thing". So it is in Potawatomi and most other indigenous languages, we use the same grammar to address the living world as we do our family. Because it is our family.

To whom does our language extend the grammar of animacy? Not just our human relatives, but all our relations. Naturally, plants and animals are animate, but as I learn vocabulary, I am also discovering that Potawatomi understanding of what it means to be animate diverges from the list of attributes of living beings we all learned in Biology 101. in Potawatomi 101, I learn that rocks are addressed as animate, as are mountains and water and fire and places. those beings imbued with spirit deserve their own grammar - including our sacred medicines, our songs, drums and even stories are animate. the list of the inanimate seems to be smaller - objects which are made by people often fall in this category. of an inanimate being, like a table, we say "What is it?" And we answer, Dopwen yewe. Table it is. But of apple, we must say "Who is it?" And reply, Mshimin yawe. Apple he is.

Yawe - the animate "to be". I am, you are, s/he is. To speak of those possessed with life and spirit we must say yawe. By what linguistic confluence do Yahweh of the Old Testament and yawe of the New World, both fall from the mouths of the reverent? Isn't this just what it means, to be, to have the breath of life within, to be the offspring of creation. The language reminds us, in every sentence of our kinship with all of the animate world.

*To return, click here (On the San Diego River and the Kumeyaay People) or here (Anthropomorphism & Interpretation)