To Be a Bay
This week I’m writing to you from my hometown of Fish Creek, Wisconsin while visiting family. And I’ve been acccompanied by Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. This book is so beautiful, and it’s been giving me new perspective on the land on which I grew up, land that was inhabited by the Potawatomi people, to which Kimmerer belongs, prior to their forced removal. All through high school I ran on trails named for the last lineal descendant of a 600-year line of Potawatomi chiefs, Simon Kahquados, without thinking much of the history of the stolen land.
Throughout the book, Kimmerer describes the Potawatomi people’s philosophy and relationship to the land. As a linguistics minor in college and someone who thinks a lot about language, I was struck by her descriptions of how this relationship to nature is reflected in the Potawatomi language:
“English is a noun-based language, somehow appropriate to a culture so obsessed with things. Only 30 percent of English words are verbs, but in Potawatomi that proportion is 70 percent...Potawatomi does not divide the world into masculine and feminine. Nouns and verbs both are animate and inanimate.”
She explains, “When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikwegamaa - to be a bay - releases the water from bondage and lets it live. “To be a bay” holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers. Because it could do otherwise - become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall, and there are verbs for that, too. To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive. Water, land, and even a day, the language a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses through all things.”
What an incredible way to think of and speak about the world. So that’s what I’ve been doing this week: looking out at the land the Potawatomi were forced to leave and trying to see the world as they do and did. What does it mean to be a bay? To be a birch tree? To be sand?
It has been a refreshing change of pace. I’ll be back in LA next week, but I know I won’t be leaving this way of seeing the world behind.
Learn more about the history of the Potawatomi in the video below.
Buy Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer here: https://milkweed.org/book/braiding-sweetgrass