Braiding Sweetgrass (2013) Robin Wall Kimmerer
For some hundreds of years the governments of Canada and the U.S. aided by Christian missionaries, hunted down and kidnapped native American children, imprisoning them in boarding schools and forcing them to read English. The idea here was to “kill the Indian to save the man.” The use of one’s native language was met with severe punishment. In this way, entire indigenous cultures were exterminated. (This is a typical Christian method of forced conversion by violence—made famous when Charlamagne emperor of Christendom converted the Saxons at sword point—If you were looking for yet another reason as to why the Christian era is referred to as the dark ages, this is it.)
The loss of these languages is the loss of what Robin Wall Kimmerer refers to as the grammar of animacy. This is a literal grammar built into native languages that allows the speaker to communicate with other non-humans. English, forged as it is in Christian metaphysics, polices this grammar and complicates any cross-species communication as being suspect before God; the first sin in bible is when a woman is convinced by an animal to gain knowledge from a plant.
Kimmerer, a classically trained botanist and member of the Potawatomi tribe, asks the pertinent question: “what if western science saw plants as their teachers rather than as their subjects?” That you might scoff at the idea of learning from a plant (part of me still does) shows how entrapped you are by the English language (law and order—god—is built into English: gaining knowledge from a plant is the first sin). And yet it is Kimmerer’s argument that because western culture has refused (or criminalized) such non-human knowledges, it has lead inevitably to our present ecological collapse. (Beliefs have consequence; the consequence of Christian belief is the total destruction of the planet.)
In the face of such disaster Kimmerer’s plea is that we become indigenous. She quotes one of her elders claiming that the colonists who have stolen the land have one foot still standing in the boat (note: the boat is going to heaven). The white settlers (me) have refused to become indigenous because western thought (Christianity) refuses such immanence; “home” for these white settlers is ultimately off-planet: the kingdom of heaven; a future non-existent place. Becoming indigenous is a home-coming to the land itself, our only means of survival; “nature” is not over there, but is rather here; nature is us. That English requires this word “nature” to describe all non-human life, is proof of the fantasy.
After 10,000 years of surviving off the land Native Americans have developed a complex relationship to the ecosystem that is based, not on the extraction of resources, as the Christians do, but on gratitude towards and cooperation with other species. Gratitude towards all life, here and now, on this planet, is the indigenous stance. From this stance Kimmerer poses this strange question: clearly the human can love nature; but can nature love the human?
