KIMMERER ON LANGUAGE
READING
Kimmerer, R. (2017, June 12). Speaking of nature. Orion Magazine.
SUMMARY
Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer tells us language is critical to perception and behaviour and that essential factors of language are animacy and attributions of personhood. To illustrate this, she contrasts English with Potawatomi. Features of English (such as being constructed primarily of nouns) and specific words (such as it), she says, help to engender a worldview that inappropriately elevates humans as well as a potent phobia of granting human traits to non-humans – all of which allows for the exploitation of the more-than-human world. By contrast, the near-extinct Potawatomi language of her ancestors is verb dominant and features an animacy she suggests is more respectful and inclusive of the natural world. With this distinction framed, Kimmerer proposes to heal English and the wider world by introducing a novel set of pronouns into the English lexicon: ki (singular) and kin (plural). These words, it is asserted, would signify any “being of the living earth” and replace the commonly used it in such a context while acknowledging and conferring the personhood and respect all non-human beings deserve. It’s hoped that using these words would help awaken us to more of our relationships and more of the intelligences within the wider world.
IMPLICATIONS
Sensitive to the implications of language and the consequences of its transformation or elimination, this Indigenous educator encourages her students to see the linguistic continent of English as a barren and dangerous landscape. She tells us that the poverty and evil found within English, and any of those who’ve inherited it, may be overcome merely by accepting the “good word”, or a pair of them. This biologist introduces into the wordly wilds, “like seeds on the wind” she says, her own personal, non-native, inorganic, and highly fecund pronoun pair. To help them root (and for us all to build a better world) we only need to reject what we know of our own language, culture, history, and science.
To start, we only need to be willing to see English and the English-speaking world as both unique from all others and perfectly isolated even from the ancient and teeming sea of Western culture. Then we should accept the label it (handed down and evolved over centuries out of the European menagerie – derived from the Old English hit, by way of Dutch het, Gothic hita, Old Frisian hit, and Proto-Germanic khi [whoa, look at that!]) as a weapon and any implementation a deliberate act of violence. And to purge this harm, then, as any ethical person must wish to do, we would only have to disconnect the word from all our most intimate and sacred connections. (Your body, soul, mind, blood; your wedding ring, your father’s song, that table your mother built, your family home: all unabashedly loved and protected – and adorned with the label it.)
And, of course, we would only need to forget that users of English employ wild personifications and gendered pronouns for everything from automobiles and ships to nations, the land, the sea, and even the Creator Himself. Then we would only have to unlearn that the primary tools English speakers employ to teach children about themselves and the world, including values of empathy and compassion, are stories in which plants, animals, and even manufactured items are personified – and that this tradition goes back past Thomas the Train and the Muppet Show (1900s), past Pinocchio and Alice in Wonderland (1800s) past Gulliver’s Travels (1700s), past Shakespeare (1500s)...
And we’d also be required to not notice that within physics-based sciences of the English-speaking world, such as meteorology and astronomy, it is convention to personify and give human or personified Gods’ names to everything from weather systems to what’s found in the heavens. Dr. Kimmerer’s worldview also demands the global forgetting of much of her own field of biology. Going forward we’d pretend Charles Darwin’s most popular works were not anthropomorphizing and, further, that a century later the most esteemed biologists of our time were not following his lead: that marine biologist Carson didn’t use both cold science and anthropomorphizing to get people to care more deeply about eels and eagles; that primatologist Goodall (like Fossey and Galdikas) didn’t name, anthropomorphize, and empathize with her primate friends (or that Gould, renowned Harvard paleontologist, didn’t call Goodall’s resultant labours “one of the great achievements of twentieth-century scholarship"); or that ethologist Dawkins didn’t make a name for himself with "The Selfish Gene" and press much deeper into the culture by likening cultural information to genes and coining the term “meme”.
Having done all this and more, we would find ourselves in Kimmerer’s barren landscape, deposed of all our foul history, language, culture, and science. And with this clean slate, purged of all connection and sense, we could then recreate the world from the Eden she envisions. Sounds dreamy.
Manipulation of photo by Simen Johan in the above article
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