If you think this is only an arcane linguistic matter, just look to the North Dakota prairie where, as I write this, there are hundreds of people camping out in a blizzard enduring bitter cold to continue the protective vigil for their river, which is threatened by the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline and the pipeline’s inevitable oil spills. The river is not an it for them—the river lies within their circle of moral responsibility and compassion and so they protect ki fiercely, as if the river were their relative, because ki is. But the ones they are protecting ki from speak of the river and the oil and the pipe all with the same term, as if “it” were their property, as if “it” were nothing more than resources for them to use. As if it were dead.

The abstraction of “dreaming up pronouns” does seem fruitless during a time in our nation’s history when the language of disrespect is the currency of political discourse. American nationalism, to say nothing of human exceptionalism, is being elevated as a lofty goal, which leaves little room for humility and ecological compassion. It seems quixotic to argue for respect for nonhuman beings when we refuse to extend it to human refugees. But I think this student is wrong. Words do matter, and they can ripple out to make waves in the “real” world.

The grammar of animacy is an antidote to arrogance; it reminds us that we are not alone. Evelyn later writes, “Using ki made me see everything differently, like all these persons were giving gifts—and I couldn’t help but feel grateful. We call that kind of firewood kindling, and for me it has kindled a new understanding. And look—that word kin is right there in kindling.”

If words can make the world, can these two little sounds call back the grammar of animacy that was scrubbed from the mouths of children at Carlisle?

We don’t need to borrow from Potawatomi since—lo and behold—we already have the perfect English word for them: kin. Kin are ripening in the fields; kin are nesting under the eaves; kin are flying south for the winter, come back soon.

Yet English grammar demands that I refer to my esteemed healer as it, not as a respected teacher, as all plants are understood to be in Potawatomi. That has always made me uncomfortable. I want a word for beingness. Can we unlearn the language of objectification and throw off colonized thought? Can we make a new world with new words?

We can acknowledge food plants and animals as fellow beings and through sophisticated practices of reciprocity demonstrate respect for the sacred exchange of life among relatives.

And the Russian language, while embracing animacy in its structure, has not exactly led to a flowering of sustainability there. The relationship between the structure of a language and the behavior characteristic of a culture, is not a causal one, but many linguists and psychologists agree that language reveals unconscious cultural assumptions and exerts some influence over patterns of thought.

“People exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love, and to defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.”

Those whom my ancestors called relatives were renamed natural resources. In contrast to verb-based Potawatomi, the English language is made up primarily of nouns, somehow appropriate for a culture so obsessed with things.

it is a language that challenges the fundamental tenets of Western thinking

We use instead a special grammar for humans: we distinguish them with the use of he or she, a grammar of personhood for both living and dead Homo sapiens. Yet we say of the oriole warbling comfort to mourners from the treetops or the oak tree herself beneath whom we stand, “It lives in Oakwood Cemetery.” In the English language, a human alone has distinction while all other living beings are lumped with the nonliving “its.”

Ecopsychologists have suggested that our conceptions of self as inherently separate from the natural world have negative outcomes on the well-being of humans and ecosystems. Perhaps these words can be medicine for them both, so that every time we speak of the living world we breathe out respect and inhale kinship, turning the very atmosphere into a medium of relatedness. If pronouns can kindle empathy, I want to shower the world with their sound.

Speaking of Nature

This shift highlighted a group-specific historical experience that distinguished it from other left-wing groups. Where previously HAW and other groups oriented themselves towards leftist aesthetics, the movement now became recognizable in public as specifically homosexual. As a result, socialist positions diminished in favor of arguments based on the homosexual lifeworld. The Pink Triangle was not only an identifier of the movement, it introduced a new discourse of political identity.