What language carries

Eighty percent of United States citizens dwell in cities. We celebrate, socialize, despair, earn, and learn in these grey grids, dotted with green if we are lucky. An average of ninety percent of our lives are spent indoors in our homes and offices. Escapes into forests, in a Kayak on a glassy lake or in skis down a powdered peak are largely available only for the wealthy. Save for farmers and the rural few, Americans learn of nature and urban life as a dichotomy to be traversed when money flows.

2020 is tense and brimming with disaster. Climate change invites a new season of ash filled air and torched ecosystems. The houseless struggle in increasingly frigid winters, while low income urban dwellers swelter in heightened heat. Rivers muck with algae blooming from dumped agrochemicals, coral bleach and aquifers taper away. Like the urban citizens we are, we search for answers in technology, the courts, government edifices and the free market, in carbon capture, senate bills, “green” investing, solar panels, and compostable plastics. Litigation and innovation are fundamental to saving our world. Yet, environment aiding litigation and innovation are driven forward by a love of the green world, a love hard to grasp in a heavily pixelated and paved life.

Not all of us have the privilege of depositing free time in national parks, which naturally cultivate a love for nature. Thankfully, this love can be instilled by ideas as well as practice, through listening to the languages of the people indigenous to the land our cities stand on.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Potawatomi environmental biology professor, ecologist, and author, writes on how the English language objectifies nature and allows for exploitation and resultantly climate crisis. English is an object-based language; only thirty percent of words are verbs. Nature is full of objects: a tree, a bay, a mountain, all in relation to the human who narrates. In comparison, seventy percent of Potawatomi is verbs. Wiikwegamaa means to be a Bay, mskwa’a means to red; verbs exist for being a hill, being a Saturday, and being a long, sandy stretch of beach.

In the Dance of Person and Place, Thomas Norton-Smith writes that in Potawatomi, as well as many other Native American languages, nouns are distinguished as animate or inanimate. Animate nouns and verbs extend the notion of personhood to the natural world; any being that relates to and affects other beings, in the way a dance affects a human or the wind rustles through trees, is categorized as animate, if not a person. Shawnee adds an a onto the end of nouns to indicate animacy, such as kweena for woman, hanikwa for squirrel and sacouka for the mineral flint. The Greek letter Theta, pronounced as the “th” sound, followed by an a designates personhood to animate beings. Wiyeeqa is the word for a human person, while skoteeqa is a fire person and nepiiqa a water person.

Water, music, mountains and fire: all beings enmeshed in networks, subject to change, act, and affect. This understanding of the natural world instilled in Native American languages has the potential to cultivate a love and respect for nature in U.S citizens today, if it was taught in schools. For in conjunction with increasing city dwellers’ access to the outdoors, knowledge of indigenous language systems melts the walls between humans and our environment, instills the truth of our relational existence, and incites the love needed to pursue and prevent further extraction and plunder. In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer writes, “If a maple is an it, we take up the chain saw. If the maple is a her, we think twice.”