Over 7,000 languages are spoken around the world. Each one reflects a rich ecosystem of ideas – seeds that grow into a multitude of worldviews. Today, many of these immeasurably precious knowledge systems are endangered – often spoken by just a handful of people. We hear from two Indigenous language champions, Jeannette Armstrong and Rowen White. They reflect on the words, stories, songs and ideas that influence our very conception of nature, and our place within it.

This is an episode of Nature’s Genius, a Bioneers podcast series exploring how the sentient symphony of life holds the solutions we need to balance human civilization with living systems. Visit the series page to learn more.

This limited series was produced as part of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature radio and podcast series. Visit the homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station.

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Transcript

Neil Harvey (Host): Over 7,000 languages are spoken around the world. Each one reflects a rich ecosystem of ideas, thousands of different ways of seeing and thinking – thousands of worldviews.Today, many of these precious knowledge systems are endangered – often spoken by just a handful of people. 

We hear from two Indigenous language champions, Jeannette Armstrong and Rowen White. They reflect on the words, stories, songs, and ideas that influence our very conception of nature and our place within it.

Language is our main tool for understanding ourselves and the universe. Different languages conceptualise and categorise reality in diverse ways. For example, in English, words like “nature” and “wildlife” define human beings as separate from the so-called “environment.” Other languages instead speak to our oneness with the web of life. 

When our lives are disconnected from nature, the words and stories we have to describe it become impoverished. Language can even do violence to nature – like the phrase ‘natural resources’ that views the environment as a thing – a commodity to exploit.

On the other hand, it seems likely that the more a language can embody the richness of nature, the better its speakers can perceive nature’s ways. If a language encodes kinship, connection, and reciprocity with the natural world, it might encourage a relationship of respect and humility. 

Indigenous languages and cultures reflect historically intimate connections to the natural world and local landscapes. There’s of course huge diversity among such cultures, forming what the anthropologist Wade Davis calls the “Ethnosphere.” He characterizes this as “all the thoughts and dreams and ideas and beliefs and intuitions, myths brought into being since the beginning of time.”

Sustaining this rich diversity of linguistic worldviews is more important than ever. Languages deeply rooted in the reciprocal human relationship with nature may contain what are sometimes called “the Original Instructions” for how to live as a good human being in a way that lasts.

Jeannette Armstrong (JA): My name is Lax̌lax̌tkʷ. And it means the sound and the sparkle of the water. And that water name really has to do with how we think about how we reflect and the way that the current runs through our land and through our veins. My English name’s Jeannette Armstrong and I’m from the Okanagan, I’m Sylix, and I’m a fluent speaker of the Okanagan Nsyilxcәn language.

Host: Dr. Jeannette Armstrong is an Indigenous author, teacher, ecologist – and a culture bearer for her native language.
Nsyilxcәn is spoken today by up to 800 people in the Okanagan Valley in Southwest Canada. Jeannette is profoundly aware of the language’s connection to the land where it’s been developing for thousands of years.

JA: The language comes from the land, and the land has an intelligence in the way that it organized itself over the millions of years that the living things from that place in those conditions had to do. And so as an Indigenous person, I know that our people were in that place for at least 12,000 years, from all of the archaeology but also from our own stories. We have oral traditions that go back to when our land was under water. And so that part, in terms of our language, is an incredible document of our learning and our science and our knowledge and our wisdom over those years in that particular place. And so every Indigenous nation has that. So language is more important, I think, in this day and age than we can really fathom.

Host: Indigenous languages co-evolve with the landscapes where their speakers live. They are systems of knowledge, beliefs, and values that reflect those local ecosystems. They hold detailed ecological knowledge, as well as worldviews very different from those of settlers arriving from elsewhere. Given the precipitous degradation of nature now threatening the habitability of Earth, paying attention to cultures connected to local landscapes may help heal the harms.

JA: The way that nature is thought about needs to change, and there needs to be a transformation in terms of how we learn about nature and how we engage with nature, and how we come to understand that we are nature. Thinking about how that intelligence has been organizing a way for all life to be.

And our intelligence needs to match that intelligence. Our intelligence needs to find ways to understand and speak about that intelligence so that we can frame that in terms of our responsibilities. And philosophically be able to say our society understands the way that we have to be in this place and in that place and in that place, each place being different. And that is the essence of indigenousness, right? In terms of how to be a part of a place in a respectful and regenerative way, is the foundational idea behind being Indigenous.

Rowen White (RW): [SINGING]

This song was gifted to me by a beautiful Anishinaabe woman named Doreen Day[ph], who is a midwife and a water protector, and this particular song reminds us that we as seed keepers, we are plant midwives. The song, in English, if you can even translate it a little bit, says “come in your own time, sacred seed. We humbly implore you that you might give us good life.”And that sets us in good relationship with our seed relatives, because we remember that we are on seed time; we’re on plant time; we’re on land time. We’re not on human time. 

[Speaking in Mohawk language] My English name is Rowen White. My Mohawk name is Kanienten:hawi, which means ‘she carries the snow.’ I’m Snipe Clan from a small Mohawk community called Akwesasne, I come from a long, long line of people who tended the earth. That lineage was severed through the violence of residential schools. 

But I’m a mother. I’m a daughter. I’m a sibling. I’m a twin. I’m a seed keeper and a farmer. And in our language, we don’t necessarily have labels for all that. I’m a Mohawk woman. Right? I’m [Mohawk term], people of the Earth. I’ve thankfully been an apprentice to my plant relatives, my ancestral plant relatives for almost three decades now.

I am one of many who’s responsible for ensuring that this work is intergenerational, and that we’re caring for those seed stewards who are coming in the next generations, and tending to that cultural memory that’s so critical, so essential to this beautiful, radical, irresistible world that we’re seeding in this time.

Host: Rowen White is part of the Indigenous Seed Keepers Network, and she operates a living seed bank called Sierra Seeds. Her work as a seed keeper and farmer nourishes deep cultural connections to the land, as well as to her ancestors and descendants. Such connections, Rowen believes, are best expressed in Indigenous languages.

RW: I’m feeling really tired of us being asked to sit at the colonial table. Right? And I’m tired of feeling like we have to adopt and squeeze and squish ourselves into these words and into these frameworks. And so I think it’s time to flip it; it’s time for us not to fit into your words, into your English language, but it’s time for you to learn our languages, and to try and understand our relationality and our kinship and the words that we have to describe our beautiful reciprocal relationship with the Earth, with our more-than-human relatives, with our ancestors, with our descendants, the way that we see ourselves in time that’s not bound and squared up and linear.

And so I often balk at the terms “law” or even “sovereignty”. It’s speaking to power dynamics and to relationships and ways of being that are not Indigenous. Right? It’s not how we are with one another. It’s not how we are with our seeds and with our waters and with our minerals and with the land, right?

I have to go back to some of the original stories that have been carried down through lineages that those seeds have heard for generations. Those creation stories, they never ended. They continue to unfurl each and every season. The responsibilities that they encode, the relationality that they encode, are coming alive in every moment throughout our ceremonial cycles. And the ceremonies are those moments in time where we meet those relatives and we renew those agreements and those commitments to them.

Host: As human beings, words, songs, and stories are the lens through which our reality is filtered. They color how we perceive our environment. Jeannette Armstrong is fascinated by the process of how language both reflects and shapes worldviews. As a scholar of her native language, she pores in minute detail over its words and structures. She pays special attention to how the language conveys the relationships between Syilx people and the natural world.

JA: Part of my PhD was to examine that idea about our relationship and our ethical framework as a result of that relationship. And so, I think about how words like “ecology”, “environment”, “resources”, “ecosystems”, and I think about what in my language is parallel to that.

So we have a word that describes what might be closest to “environment” or “ecological systems”, but I think it’s broader than that. We use the word tmixw, and that word is also connected in to the way that we think about the land, right, the actual physical landscape. The word tmixw is really a word I spent a lot of time looking at, because in the middle of the word “mi” is used many times to construct other words. So, for instance, knowledge, that’s [Nsyilxcәn term]. [Nsyilxcәn term], knowledge of the land. We say [Nsyilxcәn term], what we have learned from other people’s stories.

So that small meaning mi is in the word tmixw. Something that’s knowable—a truth. And then if you combine the “mi” with the last part of the sound “mixw” which is movement, any kind of movement makes that sound in the universe or in our land, in the wind, and everything else.

And so tmixw means “everything that can move, and that is alive”. We are tmixw. It’s not just the people that’s living now. All of the humans that have ever lived and all of the humans that are ever going to be. The same thing with every butterfly. Everything that’s living. So the life force is what tmixw is, from the past and the present, and on into the future. And so it’s a profound idea. So when you combine that with [Nsyilxcәn term], which is our word for everything that you see out there, including the water and the mountains and the soil and the rocks and the air and the stars and all of the things in every way that they interact, that’s [Nsyilxcәn term] 

That’s really a profound description in one word of the living environment and the ecosystems, and all of those things that are separately looked at in different science pockets, right, in different categories.

Host: For Jeannette, the word “tmixw” conjures up a very different vision from the English word “environment.” That difference, she believes, reverberates in the ethical relationship Syilx people have to the world around them. After the break, we’ll hear how words are woven into stories, songs and ceremonies to mediate balanced relationships between humans and other-than-humans. You’re listening to the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature.

MUSIC BREAK (00:30)

Host: You can explore our extensive media collection about Indigenous perspectives and practices across a broad range of issues from ecological restoration and Traditional Ecological Knowledge to approaches to human rights and the rights of nature at bioneers.org, or call 1-877-BIONEER to learn more…

English is the most widely spoken language on Earth, and the fact that it contains a worldview has consequences – world views create worlds. The ecological ravages and human dislocations caused by corporate economic globalization are by their very nature anathema to local communities and localized economies. Disconnection from place is at the root of many global crises.

In contrast, Indigenous languages and cultures are more firmly rooted to their specific places, and they speak to consciously reciprocal relationships with those places. For example, Jeannette Armstrong explains how the four main foods her people rely on have deep resonance within the culture.

JA: We harvest all throughout our land throughout the year. And we have four food ceremonies, our main laws are related to those four chiefs, we call them, the chief foods, they’re caretakers of all the other things that depend on them. If they’re gone, then the land is really in trouble.

Host: Syilx tradition conceptualizes their four most important foods as Chiefs, whom they honor in ceremonies. Not only do these foods directly sustain the Syilx people, but their life histories inform and enrich their philosophy.

JA: The Chief Bitterroot is one of the Chiefs that we look after. The bitterroot — which stays in one place underground and produces everything it needs from that one place— it represents a certain way of thinking about how  we can draw from the place that we’re at, from all directions to be able to do that. So, the laws are about stability.

On the other hand, the opposite dynamic to the Bitterroot we call Chief [WORD in her language], and that’s represented by the Chinook salmon. If we understand the Chinook salmon, it goes out down into the rivers, all the way out to the ocean. And when it comes back, it’s like 100 pounds, right? It’s huge. And it brings back all that wealth that our land doesn’t have from somewhere else, to bring back that food to us, that food to the bear, that food to the wolves, that food to all the things, even the trees benefit from it. 

That’s a whole different way of being and doing things that can benefit our communities, our land, all the living things, but it has to be in balance with the one that is only using the local resources. 

So the four chiefs have all different aspects that they balance out. And so those four chiefs and those four ceremonies that we hold every year to remind ourselves, to remind the people that we are an ethical people, we are a responsible people. We’re responsible to all of these living things that give us this understanding of what a balanced system is, what a sustainable system is, what a whole system is that we’re a part of.

Host: Ceremonies like these have priceless value. They attune their participants to nature’s wisdom. They heighten a shared sense of responsibility for protecting and sustaining the land and web of life.

Such traditions are sorely lacking around the world today and Jeannette Armstrong is keenly aware how critical it is to pass the language, along with its ceremonies and stories, onto future generations. Teaching the Nsyilxcәn language to children, she believes, is inextricable from learning about Okanagan land.

A lot of people lost our language, so I have been working all my life to try to give back, because I was lucky enough to wake up knowing it, right? There are children that can grow up in the Okanagan never know the animals and plants and butterflies and insects, and all of those things out there. And that’s sad. 

The impact as an Indigenous person, of having that knowledge and how interconnected those relationships are, and how fragile in some places that those relationships are, I think that knowledge needs to be in every school, in every mind, and in every way possible.

Our knowledge is in our language, but it’s also outside of the classroom. It’s outside on the land. The land speaks to you, the land explains to you. If you can look at the structures and if you can look at some of those concepts that are there in the language. If you understand that structure, then you’re never going to see the land in the same way; you’re never going to see a living thing in the same way.

So, a lot of the work that we’re doing is restoration work because that’s, for our land, it’s been absolutely devastated. And so, a lot of the young people are learning restoration and learning all the plants and learning all the things that are host to those plants, and all the animals that depend on those plants. So, it’s not just regenerating the plant, it’s regenerating all the pollinators and all the birds that use it, and all the different animals that browse on it. So, they’re learning all of those things in the language, and they’re learning the whole system.

Host: Learning the language at the same time as restoring the land is a holistic foundation for children learning how to relate to their Okanagan surroundings. Yet today, we all live in a globalized, and rapidly changing world. Jeannette believes that speaking the language in all contexts is crucial for sustaining Indigenous cultures – as well as making a transformative impact on the wider society.

JA: Language has to be alive, to be spoken in every context, in order for it to survive. It has to be contextualized into the modern world. And so, the Syilx people, as well as other Indigenous people, are making sure that it’s breaking the walls down in the learning institutions, like universities and colleges, where knowledge production is happening on an everyday level. So, our knowledge production has to be there in the language, and it can’t be done from an anthropological sense or a linguist sense in terms of looking at the grammar and how it works as some kind of unique oddity. It has to be there in terms of learning science, learning the land, learning society, learning the humanities, learning the arts, and so on.

Host: When a language is lost, so too is the vast collection of scientific and cultural wisdom encoded within it. Jeannette is a native speaker of her mother tongue, but countless people have lost their ancestral languages through the pressures of cultural assimilation and dislocation. 

For example, the residential school systems of 19th and 20th century Canada and the United States isolated Indigenous children from their families and forced them to speak English in a deliberate and violent act of cultural erasure.

Rowen White’s grandmother went through this horrific so-called school system. As a result, Rowen did not learn her family’s language, Mohawk, till later in life. She’s now dedicated to revitalizing the language intergenerationally. Like Jeannette, Rowen knows the powerful synergy of learning the language while working directly with nature.

RW: We’re creating safe places for our young people, places free of shame, of the shame of what it feels like to be a Native person who doesn’t speak your language. It’s okay. It’s okay to be an adult Indigenous person from wherever you come from, who doesn’t know the language because there are violences that have come between us and that. 

It’s okay not to know the language, and we can create safe places with our food relatives, our water relatives, our more-than-human kin to make it safe so that we can rehydrate that on our tongue again. The language wants to come back onto our tongues. Right? And agriculture and the work that we do with the land and with the seeds is a very somatic practice. It gets us out of our thinking mind.

And the work that we’re doing at Akwesasne Seed Hub, which is an initiative that many of us in our home community are working towards, is directly connected to our Freedom School, which is our Mohawk immersion school. And so, we’re doing this relational food landscape and seed sovereignty work in our community, and it’s inextricable from that language rehydration, right, and that revitalization.

Host: This work echoes Rowen’s own past: she found her way to her ancestral language along with the seeds she works with today. Seeds, songs, and stories – all bound up together.

RA: As a young woman who was desperately wanting to reconnect in meaningful ways to our traditional ways, our traditional languages, I was very fortunate to find the seeds and they found me. I really do believe that. 

In our language, we have this word called [Mohawk term], which is like the spiritual power, the collective spiritual power amongst all of us. And so, part of this work is about making choices to weave ourselves back into this interrelated web of nourishment in our own time, like the seed song that I sung, in our own time, following their instructions, their guidance.

I took my rage and my anger of something that was supposed to be my birthright, which was a bundle of seeds and songs and stories and understandings and language. And when I got that bundle, it was pretty empty. You know? And I was very angry about that as a young woman. 

But by the grace of the seeds and the land, I began to slowly fill that bundle back up again. You know, I had this question when I was 17: Who were the foods and seeds that fed my ancestors? I didn’t know their names. I didn’t know the songs that I could sing to them. But over the last couple decades, by the generosity of foresighted elders who kept seeds tucked away on dusty pantry shelves, knowing that in the right time the young people would come again and ask for these seeds, and for those songs, and for those teachings, and it would be safe again to plant these seeds again, I was able to fill that bundle of teachings, of cultural memory, so much so that my 19-year-old and my 17-year-old don’t have to ask that question anymore of what are those foods and seeds that fed my ancestors. And that’s in one generation that we can heal in that way. And so, when we get into the space of feeling like it’s too late, it’s not. In just one generation, we can heal in that way. 

And in my journey to restore power, like [Mohawk term], like power, like true power, the way that we understand it, in the middle of that sovereignty word is the word “reign”, and when we think about that word in the English language, we think of monarchy. Right? We think of top-down power. We think of all these different structures. That’s not the way we’re approaching this work anymore. Right?

And so, again, coming back around to needing new words to describe the choices that we’re making in order to restore health and vitality, and to have dignified resurgence inside of our communities that is long lasting. There’s one sort of call to action that has deep, deep ripples of impact on this Earth, is that for each and every one of you to ask that same question of yourselves. Who are the foods and seeds that fed my ancestors? And to remember that you descend from people who had beautifully storied reciprocal relationships with the foods and seeds, and they are aching for you to come home to them.