>From Rupert Ross's book Returning to the Teachings, Exploring Aboriginal
Justice, Penquin Pub. Chap. V Watch your Language. Ross was a Crown
Prosecutor who worked extensively in trans-cultural legal situations. I
thank Brian for putting me on to it and finding a copy for me. REH
----------------------------
As I listened to Aboriginal people discussing their discomfort using
English, I began to notice a number of things. For one thing, English has an
extraordinary number of adjectives that are not so much descriptions of
things, as they are conclusions about things. Think, for instance, of
adjectives like "horrible," "uplifting," "disgusting," "inspiring,"
"delightful," "tedious" and so on. When you really look at them, you
discover that they don't tell us much about things-in-themselves,but only
about the judgments speakers have made about them-and want the rest of us to
accept. The closer I looked, the more I saw that there was an important
difference between these judgmental kinds of adjectives and the more neutral
ones like "green," "fast," "painful," "thick" and so forth that try to
describe, in value-free terms, what each of our five senses has perceived
about aspects of the Creation.
But we don't just use judgmental adjectives. We have also created an almost
endless supply of negative nouns and we regularly use them to describe each
other nouns like "thief," "coward," "offender," "weirdo," "deviant,"
"phoney," "malingerer, pervert, fathead and moron, to name only a few. We
also have a large number of positive nouns as well, like "saint," "hero,"
"saviour," "mentor" and "friend." We have, it seems, created a noun for all
judgments. Few of them, however, tell us much about why they might (or might
not) be deserved by the people we apply them to. Instead, all they really
give us is the speaker's personal conclusion. When I started to notice such
things in speech, I became aware of something else as well: how seldom
Aboriginal people expressed such judgments in their everyday conversations
even when speaking English. In fact, the expression of judgments seemed to
be avoided, rather than expected. At the same time, there did not seem to
be any loss of communication. Let me try to illustrate what I mean.
Imagine, if you will, two English-speaking people coming out of a movie. The
first says "Boy, that was a depressing movie!" The second, says "Boy, was
that an inspiring movie!" It is almost as if they believe the movie "is"
something all by itself. As a result, it seems perfectly reasonable to
argue about who has characterized it "correctly" and who has missed the
mark. Sometimes they are more careful, as when one of them says "Boy,
that movie was depressing to me," following which the other can say "That
movie was inspiring to me." While they appear to acknowledge that they
might have different opinions and that it is okay to "agree to disagree,"
there still seems to be some notion that the opinion of one must be more
accurate than the opinion of the other.
When I am with Aboriginal people, however, I keep hearing a different way of
exchanging information. The first might say "Boy, I feel depressed after
seeing that movie," following which the other laughs and says, "No kidding,
I feel really inspired after seeing that movie!" After that they both
chuckle about how differently they were touched. There is no suggestion of
arguing over whose judgment is correct, for no judgments have been
expressed. Instead, the reaction is couched in each person's emotional
reaction, and the expectation is that they are likely to be very different
from each other. It is a difference that becomes all-important when we
come to look at healing, especially in cases of extreme victimization.
Speaking in that way, it seems to me, constantly declares an understanding
that part of the richness of life rests in the fact that all human beings
are likely to respond in unique and interesting ways to the same events,
things and people. In fact, the greater the difference between our
responses to something, the greater the amusement we should feel at being
shown once again how unique we all are.
Once I started listening for that nonjudgmental and non argumentative way of
talking about things in the Aboriginal community, it seemed to be
everywhere. People said, for instance: "Oh, I laughed so hard I hurt!"
They did not say, "Oh, he was so funny!", which would invite someone else to
say, "No, he wasn't!" They said, "I was so interested to hear those things,"
not "Oh, those things were so interesting!" I also often hear victims in
healing circles say things like, "When he did those things, I felt so
disgusted," instead of saying "What he did to me was disgusting" or, worse
still, " He is disgusting."
In other words, as we have seen in other contexts, great care seems to be
taken not to label things, people or events in terms of personal responses
to them or to argue against anyone else's views about them. Instead, the
emphasis is on continually stating the opposite, that your reaction is
nothing more than a personal reaction, one which mayor may not be shared by
others.
Looking back, I should have been quicker to see how widespread this careful
way of everyday speaking really is. As I mentioned, even when people are at
meetings where their opinions are invited, it is commonplace for speakers to
say something like "These are only the thoughts that have come to me so far"
or "I can only speak of my own way of seeing this. "If people guard so
carefully against suggesting that their opinion, even when it is sought,
might contain more "truth" or "validity" than someone else's, why should I
have expected any less care in everyday speech, where they are not directly
invited at all!
To Noun, Noun, Noun Me. ..Is to No, No, No Me. ..
In my experience thus far, it seems that traditional people see our reliance
on judgmental words as a very limiting way to know the world around us, and
to deal with the people in it. On an intellectual level, we all know that
someone who has justly been called a "thief" in one context of his life
might justly deserve to be called a "philanthropist" in another.
Similarly, a man who is properly called "brave and open" in one context can
deserve to be called "secretive and cowardly" in another. Whether we are
using judgmental adjectives ("fool- hardy," "reckless," "methodical,"
"cautious," etc.) or judgment nouns ("goon", "liar", "deadbeat", "coward"
and so on , they are usually only accurate if they are applied to a few
narrow events taken from a few select moments in an individual's total life.
When we apply such labels to real people, however. they tend to stick. And
when they stick, they cause us to start denying the complexity and wholeness
of the human beings we are speaking of. At the same time, they cause us to
minimize the possibility of change. I remember an Inuit man who
complained that the worst thing the judge and Crown did when they came into
his community was to call someone "bad." "You can't do that," he told
us, "and expect them to be good!"
This limiting impact of judgmental words leapt out at me when I first read
about the Family Group Conference involving the fourteen-year-old girl.
When she came into that conference, she came as an "offender" in the eyes of
everyone, especially the parents of the victim. Because of that
simplistic, one-dimensional label, they approached her with only one
feeling, anger. As the conference progressed, however, the barriers broke
down between them, as did the usefulness and accuracy of that noun-label.
By the end, as the article described it, she had become "a whole person"
again, someone for whom anger was too simple a response. When they saw some
of the other "sides" of her, their anger was joined by a wider range of
feelings, including concern and care. I don't mean that the anger
evaporated, just that it ceased to be the only response to complex issues
surrounding a complex human being.
That FGC story really touched a nerve with me, as I suspect it will with
most people involved in the criminal justice system on a daily basis. It
made me recall the young man I called Carl and the horrendous abuse he
suffered himself and imposed on others. If I think of Carl simply as an
"offender," I want to do all kinds of nasty things to him. If I acknowledge
there seems to be an opposite obligation-where coming to judgmental
conclusions is seen as either wrong or, as I now suspect, largely a waste of
time. Further, announcing such conclusions at every opportunity seems to be
regarded as a display of immaturity, if not arrogance.
I want to say something here, something that people will probably have to
experience to understand fully. When I am submerged for some time in a
group of Aboriginal people, knowing that I am not expected to judge
everything that everybody says or does {much less declare my judgments as
quickly as I can come to them!), it's as if a huge weight lifts off my
shoulders. It's a weight I didn't know I was carrying until recently, the
weight of this obligation to form and express opinions at all times and
about almost everything. I do know, however, that when I'm in places where
the opposite obligation applies, I find myself relaxing, simply enjoying the
wide range of thought and opinion expressed. I even love the opinions and
suggestions that my English brain would judge "loony" if I allowed it to
indulge its addiction to name calling.
Perhaps it's because I know that other opinions or suggestions are not
offered as challenges or threats to my own, but simply offered. Perhaps
it's because there's no obligation even to respond to them, much less fight
back. I'm not sure I understand it yet, but I do know one thing: everything
seems much less personal this way, much less arrogant, much less
antagonistic. It's almost as if the strict rules prohibiting personal
attacks in the course of proper academic debate have been carried over--0r
even expanded-into each person's private life as well. At the same time,
the competitive aspects of academic debate also seem to be prohibited. I
feel much freer to "think out loud" in such a group, to push my own
speculations a little harder, to follow some tangents a little further.
Because I know they will be received as contributions, not weighed for
judgment, attack and possible rejection, I can actually be more honest about
them as well. In a connected way, it becomes much easier to hear what others
are trying to say, because you are no longer preoccupied with trying to
assess whether they are attacking or supporting you, and how you'll "have
to" respond to them. The whole issue of attacks and counterattacks,
judgments and defences, seems repugnant to the traditional Aboriginal ideal
of civilized and respectful discussion.
These sorts of differences were underlined in an article by Susan Urmston
Philips of the University of Arizona entitled "Some Sources of Cultural
Variability in the Regulation of Talk." In it, she looks at how
conversations are "structured" among Aboriginal people at the Warm Springs
Reservation in central Oregon. A great deal of what she described seemed
familiar to me. In one section, she wrote about public meetings where
questions about certain issues are asked and about how those questions are
handled:
For Anglos, answers to questions are almost obligatory, even if they take
the form of "I can't answer right now," or a brief shake of the head.
...With questions, the speaker assumes that he will get a reply. That this
is not the case with Warm Springs Indians was pointed out to me by an Indian
from another Reservation who had married into the Warm Springs Reservation.
He observed wryly that it is often difficult to get an answer out of "these
old people" (and I should add that the phrase "old people" has the
connotation of respect). And he told me an anecdote about posing a question
that got answered a week after it was asked.
In other words, answers to questions are not obligatory. Absence of answer
merely means the floor is open, or continues to belong to the questioner.
This does not mean, however, that the question will not be answered later.
Nor does it mean that it ought not to be raised again, since the questioner
might reasonably assume his audience has had time to think about it.
Ms. Philips goes on to mention a panicular incident where a woman raised
four issues during a meeting, but no one responded to them immediately.
Instead, over the course of the next hour (in what she refers to as
"sequencing"), responses and partial responses emerged in bits and pieces,
from a number of different speakers-often in the course of discussing other
topics. Ms. Philips described it this way:
"[I]n all of this, neither the first woman nor those who responded to her
ever spoke directly to one another. ..; the first woman never called for a
response to her statements; and the 'responses' ... were widely separated
from the speeches to which they were a response. ...It may be worth noting
that with this approach to sequencing, conflict between persom can be muted
or obscured." (emphasis added)
And that's exactly how I feel now that I have grown accustomed to (and aware
of) some of the traditional "rules" of conversation amongst Aboriginal
people-comparatively free of the potential for conflict and antagonism. By
contrast, when I return to the non-Aboriginal world, I keep asking myself
why everyone seems to be arguing about everything. The contrast makes me
constantly wonder why we can't seem to just enjoy life, with all its magical
diversity, without arguing endlessly about what to call it.
Crossing over into the Verb Lane. ..
Now, as promised, I want to move away from my observations about Aboriginal
people speaking English and turn to Aboriginal languages themselves. After
all, it is here that all the differences must really begin.
And the biggest difference? I've given a clue with all my talk about staying
away from judgmental nouns and the judgmental adjectives that modify them.
Let me quote a friend and teacher, a man who has invested enormous time and
spirit in my education. His name is Sakej (pronounced "Saw-gage")
Henderson, a Chicksaw-Cherokee by birth and he said this about the Mi'kmaq
language: "...when you're speaking Mi'kmaq, you can go all day long without
saying a single noun.
My eyes can see nouns... That's what my eyes are supposed to do, see nouns,
and obstacles and tracks and trails. But that's not what the function of the
language is. It's not to become another pair of eyes. It's supposed to be
speaking to the ear and to the heart..." (emphasis added)
Is this relative absence of nouns only a characteristic of Mi'kmaq?
Apparently not. Another special friend and teacher, Danny Moonhawk Alford, a
professor of linguistics from the University of California at Hayward and a
fluent Cheyenne speaker, had this to say to an international religious
symposium in Ottawa:
How many of you out there at first assumed that "Dances" in the film title
"Dances with Wolves" was a plural noun, like "the dances with wolves"? And
then you realized at some point that it was an agent-less verb phrase
instead, talking about the dancing. It's like He-Who-Dances-with-Wolves,
except these languages don't need the He- Who. It was the same with another
character in the same movie, "Stands with Fist." These phrases are complete
sentences in their own language, but most often when we turn them into names
we turn them also into nouns, leaving behind and ignoring the structural
meaning it also had in the other language.
Now I don't want to give the wrong impression: Native American languages
generally CAN have nouns. ...The major differences to be found are in their
frequency and in the way nouns are constructed in Native America. They
usually start from a root- neither a noun or a verb or anything else, just a
root and then you add things to it to make it into a verb, and then you have
to add some other things to make it into a noun, maybe take some verb parts
away. But it seldom becomes a static noun, and its speakers are not cast
adrift of its dynamic, verbal root." (emphasis added)
But how can you have a language that lets you go all day without speaking a
single noun? What do you do when you want to talk about all those
"things-out-there" that we deal with every day? What does it mean to say
that the focus of the language is on the dancing, not the dancers? Does this
relative absence of nouns in Aboriginal languages explain the reluctance to
use judgmental nouns when English is spoken?
I must repeat my earlier confession: I speak no Aboriginal languages myself.
For that reason, I will rely completely on the descriptions and explanations
provided by my Aboriginal friends. I also confess that their explanations
have stretched my imagination further than I ever thought possible. In fact,
some would say that I have come back positively Warped! In that regard, I
am pleased to repeat something said by a leading American legal scholar,
Oliver Wendell Holmes: "Any mind that is stretched to a new idea never
returns to its original dimensions."
So let's go for it.
Where Nouns are Verb-boten. ..
I would like to introduce some of the people I will be quoting from, people
who have volunteered to be my teachers on these cross-language issues, and
so much else as well. If anything I say makes sense, give them the credit;
if anything I say is out to lunch, blame it on my inability to understand
them!
I met most of them for the first time in the fall of 1991, when I was
invited to be a presenter at a week-long series of workshops on Aboriginal
justice at Banff, Alberta. The host was Leroy Little Bear, whom I mentioned
earlier. A Blackfoot lawyer from southern Alberta, Leroy is now head of the
Native Studies Department at the University of Lethbridge. He was also a
member of the Alberta Task Force on Aboriginal People and the Criminal
Justice System.
A second presenter was Leroy's close friend, Sakej Henderson, whom I have
just mentioned. Sakej has law degrees from Stanford and Harvard and is now
director of the Native Law Centre at the University of Saskatchewan. They
and their wives, Amethyst First Rider (Blackfoot from southern Alberta) and
Marie Battiste (Mi'kmaq from Cape Breton Island), have opened their homes,
hearts and histories to me on many occasions since then. Leroy's wife
Amethyst has recently gained a Masters in Dramatic Arts, focusing on
Aboriginal storytelling, and Sakej's wife Marie is an associate professor in
the Indian and Northern Education Program at the University of Saskatchewan,
with a Ph.D. from Stanford University.
One evening after the workshop sessions, Leroy mentioned that he, Sakej and
some others had been having "conversations" about some things, and that I
was free to join them over a cup of tea in the third-floor common room if l
wished. I followed along, expecting nothing more than a pleasant evening of
chatter.
Leroy began by introducing some other people. One was Dr. David Peat, a
physicist from Ottawa. David was once a coworker with an English physicist,
Dr. David Bohm (now deceased), who had in turn been a coworker with Albert
Einstein. Bohm was also a significant force behind the original start-up
of these "conversations." I learned as well that they were a little more
formal than I had thought, for they were sponsored by the Fetzer Institute
of Kalamazoo, Michigan. They even had a title: "Dialogues between Western
and Aboriginal Scientists." The first had taken place in Kalamazoo in 1992,
with David Bohm in attendance, and the second would follow at Banff as soon
as the justice workshops were completed.
Some of the other participants included Danny Moonhawk Alford, whom I
mentioned earlier; Sam Kounosu, a physicist from Alberta; Rose Sergeant, a
physicist from Berkeley, California, and Stan Knowlton, a Blackfoot intent
on restoring knowledge of his people's huge and mysterious medicine wheels
which still dot the landscape of southern Alberta. Over the last several
years, three more Dialogues have been held, where I have come to hear from
such people as Tobasonikwut Peter Kinew, an Ojibway of the Medewewin Lodge;
Robert Yazzie, Chief Justice of the Navajo Nation; and Russel Barsh, also of
the Native Studies Department of the University of Lethbridge. Each Dialogue
is spread over three days and involves everyone taking their turns
contributing to the issues presented by Leroy.
I will never forget how that first "informal" evening began. Leroy made the
introductions, then said something like this (although I don't remember half
the puns he included}:
In our last Dialogue, you will recall that we started to examine the
movement in Western physics away from Particle Theory towards an emerging
new paradigm, one which some have called Wave Theory. At the same time, we
started to speak about the two kinds of languages, English with all of its
nouns, and many of the Aboriginal languages with their emphasis on verbs
instead. You will recall that we were asking ourselves if those language
differences could be related in some way to the differences between Particle
Theory and Wave Theory. To prevent anyone taking ownership of those
discussions, we all signed Wave-er Agreements, Particular-ly the physicists.
No doubt they were all Patent-ly unenforceable, but we signed them anyway.
At the same time, we began to speak of other things as well. For instance,
we spoke of the similarities between the "new" doctrine which physicists are
calling Chaos Theory, and the figure of the Trickster, which has been
important in many aboriginal traditions for, it seems like, ions. And we
wondered what Albert lon-stein would have thought about that.
I remember (apart from the laughter!} looking around that little common room
at all the other faces, wondering if they had any better idea than I did
what Leroy was talking about. As the evening progressed, I was left with one
unforgettable impression: while I could make very little sense of what was
being said by either the physicists or the Aboriginal people, they seemed to
have no difficulty at all communicating with each other! It was a
humbling experience but an exciting one at the same time. It was also the
first time I was introduced to the sophistication of Aboriginal languages
and the sense of universe that has shaped them.
While I have neither the space nor the skills to detail the lengthy
conversations that took place at the Dialogues, there is one thing I can
report: there seemed to be a startling correspondence between Einstein's
famous E=MC2 description of the universe and a great many teachings of
Aboriginal peoples. I'll do what I can to summarize what I heard.
In both visions, all existence is seen as energy--0r spirit- manifesting
itself through matter by organizing and reorganizing that matter in
ever-changing (but patterned) ways. It is, for instance, this energy or
force that moves through molecules of water and shapes them all into waves.
While the particular molecules of water go mostly up and down, the wave
shapes travel hundreds of miles across vast oceans. According to Aboriginal
perspectives, I gather that the particular shapes assumed by matter at any
particular point in time are far less important than the energy patterns
causing those shapes to change. As Sakej Henderson describes it in his
yet-to-be-published book Algonquian Spirituality: Balancing the Opposites:
"Indigenous people view reality as eternal, but in a continuous state of
transformation. ...It is consistent with the scientific view that all matter
can be seen as energy, shaping itself to particular patterns. The Mi'kmaq
language affirms this view of the universe, building verb phrases with
hundreds of prefixes and suffixes to choose from, to express the panorama.
The use of verbs rather than nouny subjects and objects is important; it
means that there are very few fixed and rigid objects in the Mi'kmaq
worldview. What they see is the great flux, eternal transformation, and an
interconnected order of time, space and events. With this fluidity of verb
phrases, every speaker can create new vocabulary "on the fly,"
custom-tailored to meet the experience of the moment, to express the very
finest nuances of meaning." (emphasis added)
Languages that don't have fixed lists of nouns to capture all those
"things-out-there"? Languages in which people are expected to develop the
skills to create their own vocabulary "on the fly"? How many times have
judges and lawyers watched an interpreter struggle to express an English
word in an Aboriginal language and concluded that because they didn't "know"
the Aboriginal equivalent, they were not good enough?
An example may help illustrate the way things are "named" in Aboriginal
languages. At the 1993 Dialogues, Sakej Henderson spoke of how the Mi'kmaq
language deals with trees. They are "called" by the sounds that are made as
the wind goes through their branches, in the autumn, during a special period
just before dusk. In short, they are known and talked about in terms of how
they interact with certain aspects of their surroundirigs-and in terms of
how the individual observer perceives them. In a sense, it is a very
"interactive" naming, with room for individual creation.
As we saw in connection with Aboriginal approaches to science, the focus
seems to be less on the characteristics of things than on the relationships
between things. One of the best examples of this different focus came when
Sakej Henderson dealt with the issue of referring to things by the
characteristic of their gender: "No, we don't have any gender. It's a
relationship The woman who cares for your heart-that's your wife. Your
daughters are the ones who enrich your heart. Your sons are the ones that
test your heart!"
The {relative!) absence of noun-like words, when put together with the
absence of gender distinctions, leads to something that many non-Aboriginal
people remain unaware of: the absence of personal pronouns based on gender
(like "he," "she" or "it") in many Aboriginal languages. Because they don't
exist there, searching for the correct ones often seems an artificial and
unreasonable exercise. As a result, Aboriginal people are often as careless
about getting them right as I am when I'm speaking (garbled) French and
trying to remember whether a noun has a le or la in front of it.
Unfortunately for Aboriginal people, however, getting those pronouns right
can often be critical. I remember, for instance, an Ojibway woman in a trial
giving evidence about how she had been raped. She began by explaining that
she and her assailant had been going down a deserted path alone. When I
asked her what happened next, she answered, " She grabbed me from behind and
threw me to the ground, and started ripping my clothes off." The judge
stopped everything immediately. As best I recall, what he said went
something like this: "Now just wait a minute, young lady! You told us there
was only you and the accused, on that path. And now you're talking about
some woman grabbing you! Where did she come from? How am I going to believe
anything you say!"
On the more humorous side, my Aboriginal friends appear heartily amused by
the frenzied Western debate over whether God is a He or a She. It should
be noted, however, that AIgonkian languages contain a constant division that
is not part of Western thought: the division between animate (or breathing)
and inanimate (non-breathing) things. Just as the French articles "le" and
"la" describe everything by gender, so AIgonkian languages describe
everything in animate or inanimate terms. Unlike our divisions, however, the
same "thing," I gather, can be first one and then the other, then returned
again. In my superficial understanding, it depends partly on how the
speaker relates to it. A pipestone, for instance can move from inanimate
to animate, depending on the degree to which the speaker is recognizing-and
creating-its essential spirit at that moment of its existence.
The Language of the Heart
I'd like to go back to that earlier quotation from Sakej Henderson, the one
where he said that the function of language was not to become another pair
of eyes, but was to "speak to the ear, and speak to the heart." What did he
mean by this? I have my own interpretation, although it is difficult to
express. It involves thinking about music and what we find significant about
music. It is not the individual notes or sounds that appeal to us, as much
as it is the way they all blend together in their changing rhythms, patterns
and (to borrow a musical term) "movements."
What if we took that same focus and applied it to the rest of our
experiences, looking for the shifts, patterns, movements and cadences
exhibited by all the things that surround us every day? What if that is what
we wanted to describe when we spoke of them to others? Is that what the
Inuit woman's grandfather was teaching when he took her to the shores of
Hudson Bay and had her look for the five waves? And if those were the
dynamics her eyes were to examine, are they also the dynamics her language
has been shaped to capture?
When in English we call someone, for instance, an "offender," we use a noun
to represent an unchanging state. To what extent do we do similar things
with all the rest of our nouns, creating a world that appears to be full of
static objects without connection to each other?
In English, for instance, we can say, "The tree died," and it seems to make
sense. But would it be possible to speak about that event in a way that
acknowledges that what we really have is just a conversion of matter into a
different form and to other uses, with its essential energy-or
spirit-remaining undiminished? Further, what if all of Creation was
understood to participate in this constant transformation, whether it was a
mosquito turning into frog food two days into its four-day lifespan or a
cliff becoming a sand beach over eons? Our way of speaking disconnects
segments of the transformation process, freezes them with labels like
"tree," admires them as long as they stay within that label, then laments
their "death" as soon as they pass on to a different form. In reality,
the only death has been of the noun-shape we created ourselves.
The differences between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal understandings can be
expressed in terms of Einstein's famous equation, E=MC2. It appears that the
English language, with all its nouns, focuses primarily on the mass side, on
all the "things-out-there," on the collection of water molecules sitting in
the shape of a wave. The spotlight of Aboriginal languages, on the other
hand, shines primarily on the energy side of Einstein's equation, on all the
"patterns-and-changes" that exist between and among things-out-there. These
are the forces that have not only built the wave-shape we presently see, but
are also already shaping different water molecules into new forms for the
next moment, and the next after that.
During the Dialogues, it was this Aboriginal focus on the energy side that
seemed to catch the physicists by surprise, because that was the very realm
they were wrestling with. It was also the realm for which they had found
English so poorly suited. While English was rich in words representing the
temporary shapes and formations perceived by the senses at particular
instants, Aboriginal languages were richer in words representing the
energy, forces and spirit that created all those shapes and formations in
the first place.
My Aboriginal friends talk a great deal about what it's like to have to use
English all day, and they generally describe it as a strain. If we truly
recognized that we occupy a universe of constantly transforming things,
people and relationships, they suggest, then we would have no choice but to
discard our heavy reliance on nouns to capture and describe it. Sakej seemed
to be expressing something like that when he told us: "[In] the Sun Dance,
the one thing they always instruct is never, when you get into the Sun Dance
the last day, never say a word in English, or think an English thought.
People who speak English and enter this realm come back deranged. So when
you enter this realm, whatever you do, don't speak nouns. Don't start
looking at the objects! Look for the forces that contain the Nakota part."
(emphasis added) As Bay-be-mi-say- si, the whirlwind, said to Waynaboozhoo,
the spirit of the Anishnaabe, "I am brother to the Gee-zhee-ba-sun
(tornado), I am brother to the waterspout of the oceans and seas, their
power is my power and my power is theirs" the focus on power and the
statement that they all shared the same power was far more important that I
originally understood. (to be continued.)
