7
A Heart Language

WHEN I WAS IN GRADE SCHOOL, I checked out a book on the Scottish Gaelic language from the local library. On long drives, I would sit in the back seat of the car learning a new language as best I could. With every phrase, I was catching a new piece of a mystery, like solving a puzzle of a picture I had never seen. Language can do that to us because it connects us to each other, somehow revealing both an individual cultural characteristic and the oneness of humanity, all at once.

Language is the thin thread that holds cultures together, and when it is threatened, we lose so much. I don’t remember any of the phrases I learned in that book, but I remember how it felt, sitting in the back seat of the car, unlocking a secret, learning of a people who lived and breathed for centuries before me.

In the late 1800s, the US government opened its first Indian boarding school, led by army officer Richard Pratt. “A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one,” Pratt said. “In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”1

Hundreds of other schools opened after Carlisle, all created to assimilate Indigenous children so that, eventually, Indigenous culture would cease to exist. The government and the church came alongside each other to make the children in the schools both more Westernized and more “Christian,” because America itself was built on the premise of a colonizing Christian empire. One of the most essential ways to “kill the Indian” was to strip children of their language, thus destroying a lifeline to their culture. School teachers cut the children’s hair, burned their clothes, and destroyed any remnants of their home that they may have brought along with them. In the days, months, and years following, teachers indoctrinated the children with white culture, with ideas of Christian salvation, and with the most important white supremacist idea of all: that who they were and where they came from was an abomination that must be put to death for good. If children were caught speaking their language, they were punished, and the rates of sexual and physical abuse were horrifyingly high. These boarding schools were filled with abuse and neglect of all kinds, stories that we’d never openly talk about in church or even in American society at large.

Ongoing trauma was evident in the way entire generations of Indigenous peoples left those boarding schools (if they didn’t die while they were there) unable to reconnect to their cultures, often stripped of memories and the ability to understand who they were and where they came from. We are seeing this mirrored today in our immigration policies under the Trump administration, as families seeking asylum at the border and people who have lived in the US for years are suddenly being torn away from one another, and as children are put in cages in detention centers where they are abused, neglected, and in some cases killed. Because we do not value immigrants’ lives, we do not value immigrant families or Indigenous immigrant cultures. It is ironic: a government that won’t welcome people who aren’t American enough is the same government that was once full of outsiders, a government that came from a group who forced their way onto a land already inhabited, took over, and eventually became the ones forcing others to assimilate.

Many of our ancestors were unable to communicate much of the trauma they faced in boarding schools and were instead forced to sit in shame and silence over things they could not control. Later generations of Indigenous children weren’t taught the language, and it seemed that boarding schools did exactly what they set out to do—to strip us of our identity. Many of us grew up with grandparents who did not speak a word about our identities. Boarding schools were only part of the wound. Native children were also taken from their families and adopted into white families in order to continue that erasure, and Indigenous communities are still fighting these battles today. But despite the efforts to erase us, our languages are alive, and many of us are beginning to learn them, to practice them, to listen to them wherever and however we can, because we know what it means to lose something that sits at the very heart of our cultures. Indigenous peoples who did not grow up with their people are reconnecting and returning so that they can know who they are. Language revitalization projects are happening all over this land, and non-Native people should celebrate this work. In the Potawatomi tribe, only ten fluent language teachers remain, and it is important that for future generations, we are remembering why it matters that we learn our language, that we know ourselves, so that who we are is not further erased.

I did not grow up learning to speak Potawatomi or knowing that the language itself even existed. The only language I learned growing up was English, except for the Spanish I studied in high school or the Russian I studied in college. I had no idea that we as Potawatomi people had our own language, a language that connects us back to our identity, that allows us to know our stories and our unique way of experiencing the world. I listened to the Potawatomi language for the first time over my laptop speakers while I made dinner one afternoon a few years ago. I heard the speaker from Citizen Potawatomi Nation tell me words I had never memorized, hardly heard, that still speak to me in ways that move every fiber of my being.

I stood there with tears in my eyes, because the things I did not yet understand were the things I seemed to so desperately need: to speak the language spoken by my ancestors, years ago, before we were forced out of our home, before we were assimilated into a white culture that wanted only English spoken. The first thing I memorized was a Potawatomi prayer, one that I use often instead of praying in English. It gives me a different space with Creator, Mamogosnan, Great Mystery, Kche Mnedo than I’ve had before, a space that I cannot reach in any white American church. Potawatomi author Robin Wall Kimmerer says, “Our language sounds like wind in the pines and water over rocks, sounds our ears may have been more delicately attuned to in the past, but no longer. To learn again, you really have to listen.”2

Our language teaches us to tune our souls back to the land, Segmekwe, who has always held us. Our language reminds us that we come from dust and we will return to that dust, our souls floating and resting in the magic of the galaxies and the cosmos. I began an online course to learn the Potawatomi language, to have something to pass down to my children and to their children after them. I sat at my white desk by the window in my bedroom while my three-year-old napped on the bed, and I took notes and quizzes and breathed in and out the old and sacred words.

Language is wrapped around everything else in a culture, no matter what you speak or where you’re from. It’s sacred, connected to identity, to ethnicity, to soul, to Mystery. It is the way we move, the way our hearts speak, the lens through which we see the world. Without language, we are lost. I know that this language-learning will be our legacy, the thin line that carries us generations down the road. It will take time, and it constantly feels like I’m taking ten steps back and one step forward, but every step forward is grounding me in who I am and have always been.

As a child, without knowing my own Potawatomi language, I may have missed understandings of God other than what I received within the traditional Southern Baptist churches I was part of. Knowing, for example, why we go to powwows, the significance of ceremony, dancing as prayer, the important rhythm of the drums, and the connectedness of community might have given me a different idea of how we build community in a lasting and sustainable way. I might have understood why the trees have so much to teach us and why water should be protected. That is why it matters so much that many Native people are returning, despite the work of the church and the American government to break those ties. The day I learned what the word America meant in Potawatomi, I was reminded again of what we’ve lost and of the importance of returning again to our own words. Potawatomi is not English; our Potawatomi words have so much meaning behind them. The word for America, kchemokmanke, translates loosely to “white person with long knives,” referring to the Europeans who invaded our lands and butchered our people. This is why language matters: it helps us understand where we come from and what it means to be Indigenous. Our language carries our stories and experiences, and for as long as whiteness has tried to steal that, we have continued to be who we have always been, and we will pass that on to our children.

Languages carry stories. Oral Indigenous societies pass family and cultural stories down generation to generation to preserve culture. To be able to hear one of our Potawatomi stories in Potawatomi is an absolute honor, because it connects me back to who we once were and who we still are today. Even though colonization has taken so much from us, telling our creation narrative or our winter stories, even in English, still means something. Telling our experiences, like I’m expressing my experiences to you in this book, is a sacred kind of work, and as we pass our stories and experiences down to our children, we are changing our children, changing ourselves, and changing the world.

In 2017 I hosted an event in our city focused on the conversation surrounding Indigenous people and the events that unfolded in Standing Rock, North Dakota. The Dakota Access Pipeline was originally set to go through Bismarck, North Dakota, a predominantly white city, but it was rerouted to go through an area near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, so that it impacted Indigenous peoples and their water supply. In response, Indigenous peoples and their allies gathered from all over the world to fight against a pipeline that would poison the water in Lake Oahe and the Missouri River. The event was created to give voice to Indigenous peoples and allies who went to Standing Rock to show support to water protectors, and as someone who did not go to Standing Rock, I wanted to listen, engage, and learn for myself. As the event drew closer, many of the people who were going to share were unable to come, so there were only a few of us left. I decided to open up the microphone to anyone attending and make it a public storytelling event. My friend Jonathan from the Navajo Nation stepped up to the microphone. He reminded us that we belong to each other, that we must stick together and have honest conversations for the sake of a better future. I deeply felt every word, remembering how much language and expression matter, how important it is that we speak to each other in peace and with honesty, especially when we are so divided around so many things. Can you imagine if all over the country we hosted storytelling events, inviting people to step up to a microphone? Yes, it could go wrong, but it could also go so right when people are given space to lead with vulnerability and humility. People could tell their stories of surviving trauma, their stories of beating cancer or still fighting against it. Others might tell about what it’s like to be a queer woman of color in America or a Sikh man in America who battles hate crimes against his community daily. Still others might talk about what it’s like to be lonely or in love or both. You see, our human expressions, no matter how varied, still bring us together in ways that we cannot always understand, and language is the force that guides us.

One of the church’s biggest blind spots is ignoring the stories of those on the outside. We hide behind dogma and theology instead of leaning into our humanity to connect with one another or to the land. But when we stop to look out a window and see what is happening outside, or when we step outside the door of our home to breathe the fresh, cold air, we are taking in the stories of the earth. As Anishinaabe author Richard Wagamese writes, “When you break the connection that binds you to money, time, obligations, expectations and concerns, the land enters you. It transports you.”3 And when we step back into those spaces again, those spaces filled with noise, we have stories to tell. I find that when I go outside to listen to the language that only the land speaks, she sends me back with poetry. She sends me back with a connectedness to both her soul and mine that can be expressed only in words that have rhythm and movement and life to them.

When the wind blows, we imagine she is erasing every injustice,

sweeping misdoings from the east to the west,

making room for something new, a more whole world.

Instead, what we don’t realize is that she is rustling the tree branches

to sing us a song.

Instead, she is sowing seeds across the landscapes,

seeds that tomorrow will become the beauty that restores us.

Instead, she is whispering for us to hold on, to keep going,

to water those seeds, because one day, they will show us the way home.

Poetry is life to us and to those around us. Throughout time, our poets are often our prophets, the ones who dance and sing and write, expressing things we did not know were stirring inside us for years. Our poets, our storytellers, are the bridge between the languages of the earth and our spoken languages, between the stories of the earth and our stories. May we all learn what it means to be poets who step outside and back inside, made new, sacred language flowing from our lips to and for one another.

We live in an era in which we are beginning to dig deeper into questions of how we got here. We are asking why there is so much injustice, why so many of our police are corrupt, why Black men can’t kneel during the national anthem, and why a holiday called Columbus Day is offensive. Language creates cultures, cultures create nations, and leaders of nations tend to write history, and we must ask what our language evokes, whether we are using it for good or for evil.

We live in a time when Black people, Indigenous people, and other people of color are speaking up, sharing our stories, redefining what it means to be alive in America—but let’s acknowledge that many of these people have been speaking up for a long time and are only now being heard, if heard at all.

Thanksgiving 2018 was a really difficult time for me. Native American Heritage Month happens in November, so while we are celebrating that we are still here, we are bombarded with Thanksgiving myths and people asking us for all the resources they should have been asking about any other month of the year. Kind, well-intentioned parents message me asking for book lists to read to their children, churches email me asking for Thanksgiving reflections that don’t center celebration of Pilgrims or sometimes even inviting me to preach, unpaid, on a topic that is really difficult for me, and I struggle to find the right language to express my exhaustion.

In 2018, when my inboxes were full of these messages, I finally went to my social media accounts and made an announcement asking people to stop messaging me, to do the work themselves, and to stop expecting Indigenous peoples to give more than we already give every day of the year, especially at Thanksgiving. It is a time of confusion and mourning, and I honestly don’t have anything left to give others in that space. Non-Native people responded, held me up, thanked me for speaking, and some of my white friends apologized. One friend sent me a gift a few months later, with a note of both thanks and apology, a bag of coffee mailed with it. I drank that coffee and thought of my friend every day, thought of the kind of ally she wants to become. We all make mistakes in these conversations, and we have to be willing to step beyond our fear of saying the wrong thing to ask hard questions and have honest conversations about where we go from here. My non-Native friends have to understand that the myths told at Thanksgiving only continue the toxic stereotypes and hateful language that has always been spewed at us, and they have to do the work to educate themselves about a better way. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker wrote a book on this topic called “All the Real Indians Died Off”: And 20 Other Myths about Native Americans. In the introduction, they write, “For five centuries Indians have been disappearing in the collective imagination. They are disappearing in plain sight.”4

Indigenous peoples cannot fight against these mistruths alone. Conversations about replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day shouldn’t be happening just once every year or just within circles of Native people. It should be discussed in city planning meetings, and our street signs should be renamed if they carry traumatic names or celebrate the people who committed atrocities throughout history, because language is about the fabric of a place, what we create, how we explain who we are, who God is, and what the responsibility of those in power must be. To be a place of “we the people,” we have to be a place that is truly for all people, and how do we do this if we don’t talk about the stolen land that America rests on? How do we do this if we don’t talk about Confederate monuments and schools named after racists? The answer is with all of us; to tell the truth is to give language to experiences that are often ignored by society.