The Animacy of Kinship

Pronouns, connections, and possibilities

American Kestrel, Pencil and water color on plant print. 2024

A couple of years ago, during the pandemic, I finally read Braiding Sweet Grass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. I read it with the Bird Nerd Book Club, a hodge-podge group of biologists and falconers scattered across the country. It wasn’t a book about birds, and we knew this, but the core of us who chose our reading material were wistfully seeking a love song to nature. We wanted to be reminded of what nature had to offer us even if the human world was disintegrating. Kimmerer’s book more than provided.

I listened to Braiding Sweet Grass, which I tend to do more these days, but I knew I wanted to read it again slowly. So, a few weeks ago I got a physical copy. There was a particular chapter I found and read again almost immediately because two years later, it still haunts me. It’s the chapter where Kimmerer talks about learning the grammar of animacy in the language of her ancestors, Potawatomi. And as she investigates this language, she explains that there is no division of masculine and feminine in the language, only animate and inanimate. Different verb forms and plurals apply to whether you are referencing animate or inanimate subjects.

This sounds incredibly complicated to learn and indeed, Kimmerer opines its challenges, but she is determined. Then she comes to realize that the language is an embodiment of how her ancestors moved through the world. Potawatomi is 70% verbs. It is a language where a bay is not a thing, but an act being. Animals and plants are animate and family, but more than that, so are rocks and mountains and fire and places. There is respect in this, but there is also camaraderie. We are animate objects. All our well-being matters.   

As a professional animal trainer in my younger days, I prided myself on avoiding anthropomorphism. Giving animals human traits and making assumptions about their behaviors based on viewing them through the lens of being human was a sin. In fact, I still try very hard not to think of my animal companions as human, but more so because I think they have things to teach me that are beyond what a human can share.

All the same, the constraints of my language and all the science I’ve been taught doesn’t support animating all in nature that I love. Sure, a tuft of purple three-awn grass waving in the breeze is not human, but when I watch it dance, I am intertwined with our meeting in a way that could never happen with say, a chair.

“The animacy of the world is something we already know, but the language of animacy teeters on extinction – not just for Native peoples, but for everyone.” 

-Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer

Ever since I have been pondering the things that I refer to as an “it” when what I really feel is a sense of kinship and animacy. One day, visiting a home-based plant nursery, the owner told me to watch out for the yarrow hanging over the pathway because she had become unruly. “She” had become unruly. I turned the pronoun over in my head, uncomfortable with the anthropomorphism, and gradually dismissed it. All that my language allows is to show my connection with a pronoun. So be it. I passed the yarrow carefully, with a mumbled, “pardon me, ma’am.”

The words felt weird tumbling out of my mouth, but they felt right.

In language of the people my land was taken from, the San Jacinto Mountain range to my south was Little Brother and the to the north of me, the San Gorgonio Mountain range was Big Brother. I live in a mountain pass and sometimes Big Brother and Little Brother have disagreements that result in summer thunderstorms. I watch the clouds grow on Little Brother and now I think, “he looks very majestic.”

What would change in our connection to nature if English had a comfortable way to acknowledge that the electric hum you feel in your fingertips when you point at an angry mountain range is animacy. Would it change if we spoke of mountain ranges, riverbeds, and white sage with the deference we give to all that is animate?

I cannot be sure, but when I meet a lizard on a steppingstone in my garden or a ladybug sauntering across my penstemon I’ve started greeting them as he or she. The plants in my garden are assigned pronouns and the San Gorgonio River where I wander up the street too. I tell myself the gender I choose doesn’t matter so much, but the acknowledgement of being animate does.

It isn’t that I am making them human; it is I am acknowledging them as alive. And the strangest thing has happened. Despite feeling silly about gendering animate objects I have been told to call “it”, I also feel like am surrounded by kin. The loneliness is lifted and my spirits with it. She and he and I are all in this together. The words define our place in the world and how we walk through it. The words matter even when we only speak them to ourselves.