Can you hear pre-school teachers asking, “Do you have your listening ears on?” My question is, “Do you REALLY have your listening ears on?” Can you hear the plants? Can you hear the wind? Can you hear the soil? In building off of my February blog post titled - Language., I want to reflect on concepts from a chapter titled Learning the Grammar of Animacy from the book Braiding Sweetgrass by Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer. Kolo may be a small dog, but he has big listening ears. In the chapter Learning the Grammar of Animacy, we are asked to listen in nature, to be audience to conversations in languages not our own. Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer shares her love and frustration in learning Potawatomi, the Indigenous language of her ancestors. One frustration is the sheer quantity of verbs! Many Indigenous languages have a lot of verbs. For Potawatomi, she shares that 70% of words are verbs, as compared to 30% of words are verbs in English. As discussed in the All My Relations podcast episode titled Can Our Ancestors Hear Us?, the hosts share that the practice of verbing instead of nouning in Indigenous languages creates a sense of interconnectedness. That we are not alone as beings, that we are connected and dependent on other beings. A sign that languages have worldviews imbued into it. And for Indigenous languages, part of that worldview is viewing what we call “things” in English as alive. As beings. As persons. For example, in Potawatomi the word for “a bay” is a wiikwegamaa, a verb meaning “to be a bay.” “Ridiculous!” Dr. Kimmerer ranted in her head. “…A bay is most definitely a person, place, or thing—a noun and not a verb.” As Dr. Kimmerer sat with her frustration, she began smelling the water of the bay, watching the bay rock against the shore, and hearing the bay sift onto the sand. She was viewing the bay as alive. She realized a bay is only a noun if water is dead. The water confined to only being a bay. But we know that water can be a bay, or an ocean, or a river, or a lake, or a snowflake. If we want to get nerdy about it, think about the water cycle. Every drop of water on its own journey in the water cycle. Waters of Kealakekua Bay, Hawai‘i Island. As the chapter progresses, Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer shares that in Potawatomi and other Indigenous languages, we use the same words to address the living world as we use for our family. Because they are our family. Indigenous languages use a grammar of animacy when discussing the natural world (e.g., verbs, pronouns, who rather than what, beings rather than things), just like we use a grammar of animacy when discussing our family in English.
Dr. Kimmerer shares that when she is in forests with students, she tries to be mindful of her language, to be bilingual between the lexicon of science and the grammar of animacy. She teaches the scientific roles of plants and their Latin scientific names, AND she teaches that the natural world is a community of beings. Beings that are alive and that human beings are just one type of being. I strive to be a bilingual scientist that uses the lexicon of science and the grammar of animacy. In another book I am reading, Atlas of the Heart, a book about the language of emotions and emotional intelligence by Dr. Brené Brown, she shares about our need for language to forge connection. She asks, if we do not have the vocabulary for how we are feeling or learning, how can we share? How can we share with ourselves? How can we share with others? This lack of access to words/language is perhaps one reason why my nephew and nieces throw temper tantrums. One day when I was exhausted by a 2-year-old temper tantrum, my mom asked me to imagine how I would feel if I had a quickly growing vocabulary, but it was not quick enough to help me completely convey what I wanted to? To get the adults in charge to understand me? And imagine if that 2-year-old is learning more than 1 language? Now that is impressive and temper tantrum worthy because language is our way to share about our world. Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer shares that we already know the grammar of animacy, but we forget. She writes, “Our toddlers speak of plants and animals as if they were people, extending to them self and intention and compassion—until we teach them not to. We quickly retrain them and make them forget. When we tell them that the tree is not a who, but an it, we make that maple an object; we put a barrier between us, absolving ourselves of moral responsibility and opening the door to exploitation.” So, can you remember your pre-school teacher asking if you have your hearing ears on? Can we have more empathy for language learners, including 2-year-old temper tantrums? Can we remember what we knew as toddlers and use the grammar of animacy? I think we can.
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AuthorI started this blog as part of my Botany In Action Fellowship through Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens Archives
June 2023
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