We Americans are reluctant to learn a foreign language of our own species, let alone another species. (58)
but only one student admitted to knowing of another language, and she mentioned that "they" in Mandarin isn't gendered as it is in English (the opposite is actually the case). Still, the reminder that English renders humans and a few other animals he and she and everything else it was enough to work with. Kimmerer tells of a field biologist who speaks of someone:
She kneels along the trail to inspect a set of moose tracks, saying, “Someone’s already been this way this morning.” “Someone is in my hat,” she says, shaking out a deerfly. Someone, not something. (56)
After trying that on for size I introduced Kimmerer's proposal (made a few years after the book appeared) that we might overcome the limitations of English by tapping into Anishinaabe understandings and introducing a new pronoun for living things.
Fluent [Anishinaabe] speaker and spiritual teacher Stewart King ... suggested that the proper Anishinaabe word for beings of the living Earth would be Bemaadiziiaaki. I wanted to run through the woods calling it out, so grateful that this word exists. But I also recognized that this beautiful word would not easily find its way to take the place of “it.” We need a simple new English word to carry the meaning offered by the indigenous one. Inspired by the grammar of animacy and with full recognition of its Anishinaabe roots, might we hear the new pronoun at the end of Bemaadiziiaaki, nestled in the part of the word that means land?
“Ki” to signify a being of the living Earth. Not “he” or “she,” but “ki.” So that when we speak of Sugar Maple, we say, “Ohthat beautiful tree, ki is giving us sap again this spring.” And we’ll need a plural pronoun, too, for those Earth beings. Let’s make that new pronoun “kin.” So we can now refer to birds and trees not as things, but as our earthly relatives. On a crisp October morning we can look up at the geese and say, “Look, kin are flying south for the winter. Come back soon.”
Kimmerer's word magic is dazzling but stays on the page unless put into practice, so I turned to the courtyard trees visible through our classroom's full-length windows. I'd earlier mentioned we'd have the joy of watching even as they watch us all semester. Let's try not to address kin as them, I proposed, and see what that does to us and our relationship with kin. Full in-person class indeed - it could work!
