The Power of Words

As you may know, I am Native American and White. My Native ancestry comes from my mom's side and was affected by the policies of assimilation and termination. As a result, I only learned my first Anishinaabeg word last spring when I went morel mushroom hunting with my mom for the first time.

My sisters taught us to say miigwech gashi aki—thank you, Mother Earth—each time we picked a mushroom. At first, we needed a lot of reminders about how to pronounce the words. But as we found more and more mushrooms, sometimes whole handfuls growing together, the words emanated from our hearts and cascaded out over our lips in a rush as we gratefully plucked the morels from the forest floor.

When US settlers tried to conquer the Indigenous cultures in America, they sent Native American children to Indian boarding schools and prevented them from learning their Indigenous languages. By requiring them to learn English, they weren't just replacing one word with another. They were replacing one idea with another.

Simply put, language is one of the most powerful tools we have to transfer knowledge from person to person, from generation to generation. If we create words that categorize gender and our vocabulary divides the world into masculine and feminine, we are also reflecting a belief that gender is a critical distinction through which to see the world.

So when I learned recently that many Indigenous languages don't separate the world based upon gender, but rather by animacy, it felt like a part of me deep in my soul was coming home.

In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer speaks about the inherent differences between Potawatomi and English. “European languages often assign gender to nouns, but Potawatomi does not divide the world into masculine and feminine. Nouns and verbs both are animate and inanimate. . . . Pronouns, articles, plurals, demonstratives, verbs—all those syntactical bits . . . are all aligned in Potawatomi to provide different ways to speak of the living world and the lifeless one.”

Potawatomi shifts the critical focus to whether something is alive, using the language to convey deeper ideas about the values and culture that are important to the speakers.

The Indigenous language itself allows for a life spirit in a way that isn't reflected in English, which is centered around nouns. What a different world we create when we choose a language that honors the living spirit inside everything—every tree, every body of water, even every day of the week.

“The language reminds us, in every sentence, of our kinship with all of the animate world. English doesn’t give us many tools for incorporating respect for animacy. In English, you are either a human or a thing. Our grammar boxes us in by the choice of reducing a nonhuman being to an it, or it must be gendered, inappropriately, as a he or a she.”

Imagine the different values we could have adopted if Indigenous languages had flourished throughout the last two centuries. How differently might we have seen the interconnectedness of our ecosystem and our own value in it as humans? And how freeing to be released from the constraints of a gender binary!

So I join my Tribe's weekly language class and slowly begin to expand my vocabulary. And always, always I say miigwech to the ancestors who took our language, customs, and way of life underground, keeping them secret ". . . until the day they could be rekindled. And that day is now.”