13

May You Walk the Trail of Beauty

We set off down the trail on our skis. It had snowed heavily the night before and a wonderland of fresh powder lay before us. We’d planned this trip carefully. Two days of food, sleeping gear, loads of warm clothes, all stuffed into our backpacks. It was about fourteen kilometres to the hut — a rustic wooden cabin deep in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. We’d spend the night there, build a fire in the cast-iron stove, have a few drinks and laughs, and then ski out again the next morning.

I was with a friend of mine, a lanky musician named Mark. The trouble is, neither of us had done a whole lot of cross-country skiing. We had only the most rudimentary knowledge and no map. But Mark said he’d been here before, and it wasn’t a particularly difficult route. We started off well. Someone had skied ahead of us so that we simply followed their tracks into the dark forest. It was very still. The snow muffled sound. Our skis whispered and shushed underneath us, and our breath came in clouds.

The world was incredibly simplified here. The tree branches were black against the sparkle of snow. The shadows were watercolour purple, and a slate-grey sky hung above the treetops. Both Mark and I collapsed into our own thoughts. In single file we set up our rhythms, gliding down the quiet trail and into the heart of the mountains.

We stopped for lunch four or five kilometres in. The light had flattened out, and it had begun to snow. At first it was beautiful. Great fat flakes drifted down. We grinned at each other and ate our sandwiches under the boughs of a giant spruce. Everything was fine. We set off again with the whole afternoon ahead of us. The temperature had dipped — hovering around minus ten degrees Celsius — but there was no wind and we had all the gear we needed. We were well dressed for the cold and kept up a good pace, feeling the blood surge through our legs and arms.

The snow was falling more thickly, but it was as pretty as a Christmas card. The only problem was that the tracks we were following were slowly being filled in. After a while, they were just shallow depressions, hard to see in the low winter light. And at last they vanished altogether.

Four hours in we came to a wide valley swinging off to the north.

“Is it this way?” I asked Mark.

“Um … um …” he hummed. I could tell he was looking for a sign, something he recognized. “Yeah, I think we go this way.”

“I thought you were here before?”

“I was … but it was summertime. I don’t quite …” He glanced back at the way we’d come, then down the valley again. “It must be this way.”

The snow was around mid-shin by now, which meant the person going first had to break through it, pushing one ski boot through the deep snow and then the other at no more than a walking pace. The skis were no longer gliding. There was just too much snow. It was hard work, and after ploughing this way for another hour, Mark suddenly stopped. “Um …” he began again, and this time I knew we were in trouble. “I don’t think this is it, after all. I think we need to be in the next valley over.”

Both of us gazed at the sky. Snowflakes the size of potato chips drifted all around us. Even our own tracks, just behind us, disappeared as soon as we left them.

“What should we do?” I asked.

“Well, we can’t stop here. We have to go back.”

So we tucked our heads down and turned around. Back at the entrance to the valley, we toyed with the idea of returning to the car. It was now late in the afternoon, but we could make it there not too long after nightfall if we really hurried. On the other hand, the hut — by our best calculations — couldn’t be more than another couple of kilometres into the next valley.

It seemed reasonable to keep going toward the hut. We were warm enough. In fact, we were dripping with sweat, and the first tiny sparks of fear were beginning to appear. It was hard going. The skis were now almost useless. They sank into the knee-deep snow, but we pushed on, taking turns breaking the trail. It was almost impossible to advance more than two hundred metres before the other guy had to take over. It was like playing soccer with a bowling ball. My thighs ached, and we had to stop often, grasping for our water bottles, trying to keep ourselves focused.

If the hut was two kilometres away, I reasoned, we could still make it. It was just a matter of hard work. I began to count off my steps, figuring that two full steps equalled about a metre. I counted off ten metres and then twenty … all the way up to a hundred. Only ten of these would make up a kilometre. Counting off the numbers gave me something to think about.

An early-winter twilight was descending, and though we had flashlights, we knew we had to make the hut by nightfall. The hut was at the top of a cliff. Mark had joked about that from the beginning. “It’s the last hundred metres that are the hardest,” he said. “You have to go straight up to get to the hut.”

That final thought almost killed us.

My mind was numbed. I could only think of the numbers, measuring off my steps. We’d been skiing now for almost eight solid hours and the last two had been excruciating. Everything below my neck was sloshing with lactic acid. I would count two hundred steps, then turn the lead back over to Mark. Two hundred more steps and I would return to the front. Slowly, I counted off a full kilometre.

Just as I yelled this proud fact to Mark, who was now in the lead, he collapsed into the snow. The white stuff underneath him had given way. We had crossed over a stream without knowing it. Mark was now sunk to his shoulders in snow, and his feet and skis were in a metre of water below that.

“Jesus!” he yelped.

I clipped out of my skis and got onto my belly. I’d seen this in movies before. It was how you were supposed to rescue people who had gone through ice. Mark’s feet were on the bottom, so he wasn’t going to sink anymore, but still he wasn’t able to move and I thought he might go into shock or something. Mark let loose with a blue streak of swearing, and I told him to calm down while I gripped one of his arms and began to haul him out.

It took a while, but he managed to squirm up and out onto the surface of the snow again. His pant legs were soaked through, though, and already they were crusting with ice.

“Shit,” he muttered, looking around. “How far do you think we are from the fucking hut?”

“At least a kilometre … and then, you know, it’s straight uphill for the last bit.”

Mark’s face was pink with rage and frustration. “Shut the fuck up!”

“Okay, okay … what are our options here? What should we do? We need to think.”

The shadows had enveloped us now. There wasn’t much light left in the sky. “Should we push on?” I asked. I was worried, actually, that I wouldn’t even be able to reason with him anymore. As bad as I felt, I knew he was having a worse time of it. Hypothermia was a real possibility.

“No,” he growled. “We have to —” He shook his head.

“We have to what?”

“We have to build a snow cave.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“I don’t see that we have much choice.” He inhaled. “Look, we dig a hole in the snow and cover it up with spruce boughs. Maybe we can light a fire or something. We’ve got our sleeping bags. We just have to get through the night and then we can get out of here in the morning.”

I looked around. The snow hadn’t let up at all, and it was now most definitely dark. “Okay,” I said.

“Take off your skis,” Mark said. “We’ll use them as shovels. We’ll dig over there — in that big drift.” The temperature was falling. “C’mon, dig. Help me dig.”

You can’t really have a book about language without mentioning the Inuit and their sixty-four words for snow. Or is that one hundred and twenty-eight? I don’t know. Each time the story gets told the number gets bigger. I call it the Great Inuit Snow Hoax.

The Inuit constitute a number of different groups, from the Kalaalit in Greenland to the Inupiaq of Canada, the Alutiiq in Alaska, and the Yup’ik in Siberia, whose similarity in language is perhaps the best argument for the land bridge migration hypothesis over the Bering Strait.

For a long time the Inuit were called Eskimos, a term still used in parts of Alaska. The word Eskimo comes from a derogatory term thought to be from an Algonquian language to the south. Some say it means “eaters of raw meat,” though no one is quite sure because the word has come to us third-hand via an early French trader’s approximation of it: Eskimaux.

As for the Inuit and their words for snow, they don’t really have that many. The original field research comes from Franz Boas, a famous anthropologist and linguist who, in 1911, wrote that “Eskimos” had only four words for snow: aput, expressing snow on the ground; qana for falling snow; piqsirpoq for drifting snow; and qimuqsuq for a standing snowdrift.

The whole thing is a misunderstanding. Even Boas’s catalogue of four words greatly misses the mark. The language of the Canadian Inuit, Inuktitut, simply doesn’t work the same way English does. Boas was looking for nouns. In the bias of an English-speaking world, nouns rule. The subject and the object have always been at the heart of English sentence structure. We tend to divide the world into things rather than actions or properties. Inuktitut, and most of the indigenous languages of the Americas, work quite differently.

In Inuktitut the verb to snow, qanniq, can be modified by literally hundreds of different suffixes — anything from who’s talking about the snow (and who they’re talking to) to the time, causality, and speed of what’s happening. Even then it’s just as likely that a conversation about snow would be based around different verb roots like to freeze or to blow or to drift or even to clump together.

These long, extended verbs often form whole sentences and really can’t be thought of as single words at all. So to talk about how many words the Inuit have for snow is quite ridiculous. You might as well try to count how many sentences in English contain the word snow. It just doesn’t make sense.

Try this sentence on for size: Qanniqlaukaluaqtuq anitunga. It means: “Although it’s snowing very heavily, I’m still going out.” That’s a whole sentence in English, a sentence of nine different words, a sentence Mark and I had foolishly managed to act out.

Mark and I dug out a pit in a snowdrift, covered the roof with spruce boughs, lumped more snow on top of that, and then built a small fire by the entrance. In fact, it wasn’t that bad. My feet were cold, but only because I’d stubbornly kept my socks on. They were damp, and even down there in the sleeping bag, they just never warmed up.

At the first light of dawn we skied back out to the car. It took four or five hours, and my legs were like blocks of cement. They had become so stiff from the cold, cramped quarters, and gallons of lactic acid gushing through them that when we at last got to the car I could hardly bend myself into a sitting position. We drove after that, as quickly as we could, to a hot springs not far away. When I dipped myself in the steaming water, I actually screamed — a curious mix of both pleasure and pain.

A people’s environment does, obviously, have a huge impact on their language. It’s not always as simple as counting words, though. A word is like a chess piece. It doesn’t really matter how a chess piece is carved — whether it’s shaped like a horse or a castle. It doesn’t matter what it’s called — a rook or a bishop or a knight. What matters is how it’s used, how it moves.

Languages function within a certain environment. They’re tools for surviving within that environment. But that’s not to say they don’t migrate. In fact, despite all my talk of territoriality and environmental construction, languages tend to move around a fair bit. They’re organic things, and like all living things, they roam endlessly, searching for places where they’ll be most successful.

The ancient world was a pretty fluid place. Things moved and changed all the time. Peoples and ideas swept across different landscapes, as they do today, interacting with one another and the new environments, creating new worlds out of old. Languages have always had to change and adapt. They are, as the Inuktitut might say, not so much things as actions.

Where the tundra meets the great boreal forests, where the Inuit lands end, we find evidence for one of the most astonishing language migrations in the New World. All along the Mackenzie River in the Northwest Territories are the Dene. The word Dene, of course, means “People.”

On the northern banks of the Mackenzie, at a junction with Great Bear Lake, there’s a little Dene settlement called Tulita. Great Bear Lake is the third biggest lake in North America. People forget that, I suppose, because it’s frozen over for a good part of the year. In fact, supplies are trucked into Tulita over ice roads, making for a precarious crossing in the spring months.

Tulita used to be called Fort Norman. It was a trading post, but now it’s home to about three hundred and fifty people. Most of them are Willow Lake Dene. They have satellite TVs and telephones. Out on the fringes of town, however, there are a couple of dozen people from the Mountain Dene band, and they still tend to live on the edge of things, making their living by hunting and trapping, much as they’ve done for thousands of years.

Both speak a Dene dialect called Slavey. At the little schoolhouse there they still teach the kids how to hunt caribou, how to sew the skins together, and presumably how to avoid spending the night in an improvised snow cave.

Grizzly bears come down into Tulita a couple of times a year, and when this happens, everyone unties their dogs. Not so the dogs will attack the grizzlies. The dogs wouldn’t have a chance, no matter how many of them there were. No, it’s to give the dogs a fair chance of getting away. Even at that, four or five dogs never seem to return after the night the grizzlies hit town.

It’s a rough life for everyone up there. One woman I know of had already had six children. She was twenty-eight years old. She was having her seventh, already several more than she could handle. But there’s an unwritten law in this community. If the next baby is a girl, she’ll keep it. If it’s a boy, then she’ll give it up and someone in the community will always take it. They take care of their own here. Even in the language you can see this. In Slavey there are two different words for brother, depending on the birth order. An older brother is a sUnaghe, while a younger brother is a sechee. They’re different because of what they do. An older brother carries responsibility. He can take care of the younger children. He can hunt with his father and carry part of the family’s workload. A younger brother is, well … not exactly a burden but someone who is, at least for the time being, less useful.

So words are less about things and more about what things do, what things mean. The Dene language describes the way of life in the Far North. It’s a language at home in the long winter, a tongue spoken at the very edge of the Arctic Circle.

What’s surprising then is that this same language — or dialects of it, anyway — can be found in pockets all down the long spine of North America. On the Great Plains where the buffalo once roamed in herds of millions, there are Dene. And farther south, in the sunbaked canyons of Arizona and New Mexico where they grow corn and live in pueblos, there are more Dene.

We can follow this linguistic trail for thousands of kilometres through a series of wildly different landscapes. And what that means for the people and their language is as fascinating a story as you’re likely to find in the study of the world’s languages.

The winter was a long one. The ice was thick on the great lake, and the people moved out across it in a long line. A wind howled across the ice but, wrapped in thick buffalo robes, the people plodded on. Beneath their feet the ice shifted sometimes in thunderous cracks, but still they moved on across the long lake to the safety of the farthest shore.

One small boy rode on his grandmother’s back. Only his little pink face peered out from the bundle of robes, but with his clear young eyes he spied something black in the ice, just off to the side of the long trail of people. “Isu,” he called through the wind. “Grandmother, there’s something in the ice.”

The grandmother stopped and squinted into the wind. It was true. Something black was sticking out of the ice.

“It’s a bone,” the boy cried. “Or a horn. Can I see it?”

The grandmother let the boy skitter off her back and onto his feet. He tottered across the ice toward the odd thing sticking out from the ice, and she could do nothing except follow.

When they arrived, they saw that it was a large horn, though not the horn of a ram or any other animal they could identify. The boy danced around it. “Can I have it? Can I have it?”

So, not wishing to let anything go to waste, the old woman began to chip away at the ice around the horn, hoping to free it. In her mind, as she worked, she wondered what animal it might have come from and how it came to be there.

Even as she pulled on the horn, trying to release it, the ice started to crack. With a momentous shudder the crack ran through the ice sheet and across the whole length of the lake. In a moment it split wide open, leaving half of the long line of people to the south of it and half to the north. Each half scattered, running in opposite directions. Those who were caught in the north remained there. Those on the other side, those to the south, well, they kept on going, moving farther and farther into the lands of the sun.

The above is a story that was told by Helen Meguinis, who was one of the elders of the Tsuu T’ina band. The Tsuu T’ina live in southern Alberta several thousand kilometres south of their Northern Dene cousins. Their treaty lands are on the southwest edge of the oil-rich city of Calgary. T’ina is one spelling of Dina — that is, Dene.

The Tsuu T’ina live in a completely different world. When the ice split on the lake, whether metaphorically or literally, the Tsuu T’ina were the group who headed into the grasslands in the middle of the continent. It’s difficult to say when this happened. As an oral history, the story dates back hundreds of years, and over those many centuries, the Tsuu T’ina lost their northern ways. Like the other nations of the Great Plains, especially the Blackfoot and the Stoney who are their nearby neighbours, the Tsuu T’ina adapted to the ways of the buffalo hunt. They lived in teepees and learned to ride horses, all words and concepts that don’t even exist in the dialect of their Northern Dene cousins.

Tsuu T’ina, by their own accounts, means simply “Many People,” which is ironic considering that only about two thousand people still live on the Tsuu T’ina reserve. And fewer than one hundred are still fluent in the Tsuu T’ina language. Even Helen Meguinis passed away, sadly, in 2007 at the grand old age of eight-three.

Of the three hundred aboriginal languages spoken in North America at the time of European settlement, one hundred and fifty have disappeared completely, and only a handful of the remaining ones are still acquiring new speakers. And that was why I jumped at the chance to go to a powwow on the Tsuu T’ina reserve one dusty summer day. I drove out of Calgary and headed west to a point where the long prairies turn into the forested foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

This was to be a huge powwow. Several thousand people were going to be there. Dene representatives were coming down from the north. There would be Cree and Ojibwa, too. Even the neighbouring Blackfoot would be arriving in their trucks and campers.

Powwow is derived from an Algonquian term pau-wau or pauau, which referred historically to a spiritual gathering. It was generally a sort of religious ceremony, usually for the purpose of curing and healing. Powwows are practised across North America now, and many, like this one, are referred to as Gatherings of Nations. They feature dance competitions and drum circles. The people of many First Nations come from as far away as Yukon Territory to the north and Arizona to the south. All are welcome, even skinny white guys like me.

Not a drop of alcohol was to be found anywhere on the huge fairgrounds. No one snuck it in, either. They had some pretty strict rules about that. The people here had come to be together, to converse, to meet, and to extend the hand of friendship across many nations.

I drove across a rattling cattle gate, and someone waved me into a field to park my car. There were other cars there and loads of campers and tents. Several thousand people had come for the three-day event, and I could hear drums beating in the distance. It was dusty and hot, and I drove around a little until I saw a piece of grass where I could pull my car up and out of the way.

I’d just turned off the engine when a woman in a buckskin coat hurried over to me. “You can’t park there.”

Shit! I thought. I’d been there ten minutes and already I’d made some sort of mistake. I’d dishonoured something. I wondered if I’d somehow parked my car on a bit of sacred land. There must have been a reason why no one else parked there. It was a big green space, so maybe it was a teepee ring, a medicine wheel, or something.

“I’m so sorry,” I muttered. “I didn’t mean to disrespect anything. I … ah …”

The woman glared at me as if I were a complete idiot. “You can’t park there,” she said, “because you’re blocking the ice-cream truck.” And sure enough, I saw that I’d parked against the opened side window of a panel van. A gaggle of dark-haired little children had surrounded my car. They gazed up at me expectantly. Could I please get out of the way so they could get themselves a snow cone? Was that really too much to ask?

Remember the anthropologist Franz Boas? He’s the one who came up with the four Inuit words for snow. Well, he had two students whose names are infamous in linguistic circles. One was Edward Sapir and the other was Benjamin Whorf. I actually spent a lot of time at university looking into their theories — what we now collectively and rather unimaginatively call the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

Essentially, it says that a language sets up the categories and organizations by which we understand the world around us. “We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages,” Whorf wrote. We sort out the wild chaos of data that our sense organs bring in using the structures of the language we speak.

The naming of colours is a good example. Colour actually exists along a continuum — the rainbow or, if you like, white light refracted through a prism — and the dividing line between, say, yellow and green isn’t an exact point. It’s open to cultural or even individual taste. There are no borders in a rainbow.

So different languages tend to divide up colours in different ways. For example, the Haida have only four colour terms. The word ghuhlghahl corresponds well to the Chinese qing or the Dene doot3’izh, but not to any single word in English. It covers most of the range that English divides more specifically into terms like blue, green, purple, and turquoise. Ghuhlghahl, instead, is the colour of the sunlit living world, including the blues and indigoes of the sky, the greens and blues of the sea, the summer colours of the mountains, and the greens of needles, shoots, and leaves — clearly distinct from white and red, though it can sometimes include hues of yellow, brown, and even black.

All of this is distinctly marked in different languages, so the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis says that colour — our way of thinking about it and even our way of seeing it — is organized by the language we have for it.

In my graduate work I came across a quintessential set of experiments on colour. Two researchers, Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, tested speakers from ninety-eight different language groups. There were a few rare tongues with only two words for colour (the Dani language of New Guinea, for example, has only words for black and white, their jungle world being almost entirely composed of darker or lighter shades of green). A few more languages have colour words for three hues: black, white, and red. Languages with a fourth colour name usually include specific words for yellow or green. It goes on until you hit languages like English that generally speak in terms of eleven broad categories for colour: black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, pink, purple, orange, and grey.

But the thing is, even among speakers of languages with only two words, all people are equally able to distinguish between a broad range of hues. The Dani speakers of New Guinea make almost exactly the same mistakes as English speakers on a colour memory test involving more than forty colours, which shows, pretty conclusively, that the Dani speakers are no better and no worse than the English speakers in their perception of real colours.

So what do we make of all this? Sapir and Whorf would have predicted that different language speakers really see colours in different ways. And they would be dead wrong. A strong version of their theory — linguistic determinism — had to be thrown out for a very simple reason. There are lots of things in our thinking that are outside the control of language. Colour is one of them. It doesn’t matter if the Dani don’t have a word for red. They can distinguish between the red of one flower and the pink of another, especially if they know that the red one is poisonous and the pink one isn’t. They figure that out pretty quickly, language or no language.

But that’s not to say there’s nothing to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in general. Language rides pretty high in our consciousness, and to admit that it has at least some effect on our thinking is really a matter of common sense. Just what that effect is, though, is pretty hard to pin down.

Researchers like Lera Boroditsky at Stanford University are still doing some pretty convincing tests (as recently as 2007) on the influence of language on colour in English as opposed to Russian, the ideas of time in English, Greek, Spanish, and Mandarin, and even on the gender of toasters (yes, toasters) and other inanimate objects in Spanish and German. Linguistic determinism is dead, but the view that language somehow still affects us is widespread and, in some cases, even provable. It’s a notion called linguistic relativity.

In the summer of 1922 Edward Sapir himself appeared on the Tsuu T’ina land. Treaty Seven had already moved them into a particular two-hundred-and-fifty-square-kilometre reserve, and their language was already showing signs that it might disappear.

Sapir worked with a Tsuu T’ina interpreter named John Whitney. Together they spoke with many of the elders of the nation and managed to fill seven notebooks with an incredibly detailed account of the Tsuu T’ina grammar system.

What they failed to record, though, is how the Tsuu T’ina lived. They said nothing about the other semiotic systems under which the Tsuu T’ina make their way in the world — the tastes of their food, the clothing they wear, their haircuts, their dance patterns, the symbols on their teepees. All of these comprise a much larger grammar, something Sapir and Whorf never quite imagined, and all of it makes up their true House of Being.

The central point of the powwow was a huge circular covered area. I sat cross-legged on the floor. There were no seats left, but I was in time for the Grand Procession. Representatives from all the attending nations would be dancing into the centre. Four or five different drum circles were dotted around the enclosure. Each drum circle had five or six guys, and the drum circles took turns playing. First, near the entrance, one circle went at it, banging out a fantastic rhythm like the swelling of a heartbeat. They chanted, too. I had no idea what they were saying. I didn’t even know if they were all Tsuu T’ina or whether some of the other circles were guest drummers from other nations.

In time the first drum circle closed off its performance, and the group next to me started up. It had a few younger guys and one older man, not quite an elder but clearly middle-aged, who called out instructions to the younger ones. “You’re cutting it off too soon!” he bellowed, and one of the younger guys, his hair in two long braids that came down over his shoulders, bent into the chant more conscientiously, his face contorted with the effort of getting it exactly right.

Then the dancers came in, dozens of them, hundreds of them, each doing a version of their own nation’s dances. There were Cree and Blackfoot, Ojibwa from the East, and even a couple of Navajo from the far reaches of the southern United States. The range of costumes was incredible. They flashed with colour. Feathers and beads bobbed and tinkled. Some had headdresses, others wore furs. Elk skin moccasins pumped to the hypnotic beat of the drums. One young boy danced in, and all along his chest on a sort of leather jersey, he (or his mother more likely) had sewn blank silver computer CDs — a note from the present.

It took almost an hour for everyone to enter. The drummers pounded on. The dancers wove and twirled until finally everybody was present. The drums quieted and the assembled were invited to sit. Then one man stood up at the front. I didn’t know who he was. He wore a lightly tanned rawhide jacket, the kind with leather tassels coming down from the hems. This man made the most amazing announcement. “We’ve now raised the money,” he said, “for a Calling Home Ceremony. Eleven groups will go.”

Just as I was wondering what a Calling Home Ceremony might be, he began to explain. “Elders and representatives from eleven nations will be going this summer to Normandy.”

Normandy? I thought. Like in France?

“Many of our brothers fought in the world wars,” the man continued. “Many of them lost their lives in Europe. Now it’s time to call their spirits home. We will be a strong group — the Inuit and the Métis, the Cree and our gracious hosts the Tsuu T’ina. We’re going to bring our brothers’ spirits home at last.”

There was great applause, of course. The man’s words left an indelible image in my mind: the elders of many nations standing on the beaches of Normandy, chanting softly for the spirits of their ancestors, those who sacrificed themselves along with all the other Canadians on the beaches of D-Day. That was a beautiful thought.

Toward the end of the welcome speeches, one of the Tsuu T’ina elders got to his feet. His name was Fred Eagle Tail. He’s one of the small group of people who are still fluent in the ancient Tsuu T’ina language. Fred gave a prayer in the old language, but then switched into English for his speech. It was his final words that stayed with me. “Children of nature,” he said, “be strong. Remember always to hold your heads high.”

I once travelled to a site just to the south of the Tsuu T’ina lands. On a long cliff rising unexpectedly from the prairies there’s an archaeological dig with the fantastic name of Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump. For many thousands of years the first peoples here ran small herds of buffalo off the cliffs.

Sixty million buffalo once roamed the Great Plains, and life in the grasslands — for the Blackfoot, the Tsuu T’ina, or the Stoney people, who live just to the west — depended almost entirely on the migrations of these huge herds. The buffalo was their chief source of food, fuel, clothing, and shelter. Everything was used — from the horns to the tail. Nothing was wasted.

Two spearheads found at Head-Smashed-In date to almost nine thousand years ago, making the site far older than even Stonehenge or the Pyramids in Egypt. I stood there on the lip of the cliff. On the western horizon the Rocky Mountains rose. To the east and south the wide grasslands stretched off unimaginably. I closed my eyes and tried to picture the place as it must have been.

Today the Head-Smashed-In site is on Blackfoot land. Blackfoot is the literal translation for the name they call themselves — the Siksika. They speak an Algonquian language distantly related to Cree and as different from Tsuu T’ina as English is from Arabic. They’re from completely different language families, and yet both were intrinsically dependent on the buffalo.

Neither the Blackfoot nor the Tsuu T’ina were likely the original users of the cliffs at Head-Smashed-In. No one knows who those first spear points really belonged to. It seems that wave after wave of migrations probably passed through these lands over the millennia, and as the people came, their way of life adapted to the prairies. All seemed to find a way to drive the buffalo off the cliffs. It was an economic windfall, a wealth of hides, food, and bone implements that would see them through even the cruellest winters.

Buffalo in the Tsuu T’ina dialect is x.na. As the band spread into the grasslands, x.na must have come to mark a central concept, a crucial piece of vocabulary in their whole way of being. X.na, though, isn’t a word found in the Northern Dene dialects. There were simply no buffalo up around the Arctic Circle. In order to refer to a buffalo the Northern Dene use the same word they employ for a musk ox — hotéli ejeré.

So where did the word x.na come from? When the Tsuu T’ina were presented with this new source of food and livelihood, who came up with the word to name it? Well, there are really only two ways in which a new word can enter a language. First, a new piece of language can be deliberately constructed — anything from the formal construction of a new word (like the Hebrew construction of the word airplane) to the more informal elements of slang (like the computer slang of surfing, hacking, or spam).

The second way in which a new word comes into existence is just to borrow it from another tongue. A buffalo in the Blackfoot language is an iiníí. The middle n and the surrounding vowels in both x.na and iiníí may point to a shared cognate.

Blackfoot, though, is distantly related to Cree — both are Assiniboine languages — and you would think that the Cree word might offer up some clues. However, it’s paskwâwimostos, which obviously bears no relation at all. It’s a mystery then. Both the Tsuu T’ina and the Blackfoot have adapted these words, but from where we’re not certain.

In English I’ve been using the word buffalo, but that’s technically not correct, either. The animals in North America are more properly called bison. Still, this is exactly the point. Pretty much everyone here calls them buffalo. Languages are like free markets. They’re democracies wherein a thing gets named by whatever most people choose to call it.

Of course, I’m still stuck on single words here. I don’t think the Dene dialects are quite as verb-heavy as Inuktitut, but still I’m probably making more of the individual word stems than they really deserve. The Tsuu T’ina language would be wrapped around a wide variety of phrases and sentences — everything to do with the way they hunted the buffalo and the way they butchered them. The language — all the slang and swearing, all the wordplay and joking, all the various comments and utterances that might have taken place around the fire after a big kill — that’s the real stuff. Even the grunts and shrugs between the words would hold communicative content.

To understand it all, we would have to be there. We would have to be brought up in that particular society, in that particular place, at that particular time. It’s something lost to us, probably lost even to those few souls who still speak the Tsuu T’ina language today with any fluency. No one now on the Tsuu T’ina lands speaks only Tsuu T’ina. They’re all bilingual and speak English more and more in their everyday lives. No one hunts the buffalo anymore, and though they do keep buffalo on the Tsuu T’ina nation — I’ve seen them between the trees — the times are long gone when they would run them off cliffs, when they would butcher them and live in teepees made from their hides.

Words change with the world around them. It’s a central feature of all languages. Nothing stays the same for long. Buffalo in the Tsuu T’ina dialect today is x.na-tiƒÁi, which means real buffalo or natural buffalo. This serves to distinguish them from the domestic cattle that now range across the ranchlands.

And so it goes.

When the powwow was over, I walked around the grounds for a while. The setting sun cast long shadows. Children played with water pistols. A few of the older kids were out behind a shed, sneaking cigarettes. One old battered Winnebago sat on the field not too far from my own car. It had Arizona plates, and when I came around the side, a family had a barbecue going. They were cooking hamburgers — everyday normal beef — and the scent of it drew me closer.

“Hi,” I said.

They looked up from their cooking. One guy had a metal spatula in his hand, and except for the braids in his hair, he could have been any father barbecuing up a storm in the suburbs.

“You from Arizona?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“You drove up here all this way?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Are you … Navajo?”

The father flipped a burger over. “Yup, that’s us. Do you want a burger?”

“Um, okay.”

“Ketchup … mayonnaise?”

“Maybe a little mayonnaise, please. Thanks.”

He passed me the burger. It was delicious.

“So,” I said, “can I ask you … do you also speak the Dene language?”

“Navajo is a Dene language, yeah.”

“So can you understand the Tsuu T’ina?”

“Well, a little, yeah. If they speak really slowly, I can make out a few of the words. They’ve got a funny pronunciation, though.”

Water in the Tsuu T’ina dialect is tu. In Navajo it’s tó. The sun and the moon are Sa and TådhåzaÝ in Tsuu T’ina. In Navajo they’re Shá and T3’éhonaa’éí. Clearly, they’re dialects of the same language. But here’s the thing. The Northern Dene, like the Willow Lake people at Talita, live in a land where winter still rules. They hunt caribou and cross frozen lakes for a good part of the year. The Tsuu T’ina live on the Great Plains and hunted, for centuries, the great herds of buffalo. The Navajo, meanwhile, are an agricultural people living in pueblo villages, growing corn and beans, and wearing jewellery of turquoise and copper.

Halfway through my burger, I remembered a phrase I’d studied in Navajo. Very likely my pronunciation of it was horrendous, but I tried, anyway. “What,” I said, “does s1’áh naagháí bik’eh hózhó mean to you?”

He looked up quickly. “How did you know that?” I sensed a little edge in his voice now, and I thought for a moment that this was something I shouldn’t have asked about. This time I really was parking, so to speak, on sacred land.

“Those are words we use in our ceremonies,” he said. He didn’t correct my pronunciation and he didn’t seem as if he wanted to say more about it. On the other hand, he didn’t seem ready to grab my hamburger and tell me to get lost. I changed the subject, and we chatted about things that were a little less personal … a little less sacred.

Later I watched their Winnebago trundle off across the field, throwing up a cloud of dust behind it. They had a long way to go home — three or four days of straight driving. Now they could follow the blacktop all the way down, but a thousand years ago, more or less, the Navajo really would have moved south from here, right through here. It might have taken a few hundred years to get all the way to Arizona, stopping here and there, adapting to new ways of life. But something kept the Navajo pushing farther and farther down the continent. Something made these Dene speakers finally lose the ways of the ice and snow, lose the ways of the buffalo and come, at last, to the canyon lands of the far south.

I should say here that most Navajo, and I suspect a fair number of Dene and Tsuu T’ina people, won’t be happy with all this talk of migration. It doesn’t help with legal land claims. Many First Nations peoples have oral histories and creation stories saying they’ve always been in the same place, and they surely have for many hundreds of years. I’m just saying that the linguistic records — and a few of their own oral histories, such as Helen Meguinis’s lovely story — point to a long, slow movement down the continent. Again we’re talking slow here, over hundreds and hundreds, probably thousands of years. So the point is kind of moot.

An even longer record, the DNA one, shows that all peoples move, given enough time. People travelled from Africa into Asia. Some looped from there into Europe. Others, out on the far edges of Asia, moved at last into the new continents of North and South America. And so it goes. We’re a wandering species. We go where the food is cheap and the weather is bearable. We just don’t go very quickly.

The Navajo are now the largest First Nation in the United States. Dinétah, or the land of the Diné people — the Navajo — stretches over the four corners between Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. It’s a reservation as big as some states.

Navajo is thought to be a Spanish term, possibly from the archaic Spanish word nava, meaning “secluded valley,” something like the Old English dell or vale. A document from 1620 refers to the Navajo as the Apachu de Nabajo. Their lands now encompass about seventeen million acres, covering most of the so-called Colorado Plateau, a high desert of red rock canyons and waterfalls, of rattlesnakes and sandstone arches under a brilliant deep blue sky.

The Navajo language has somewhere between one hundred and twenty thousand and one hundred and fifty thousand speakers, making it one of the most widely spoken indigenous languages in all of North America. It’s also one of the most carefully documented. One of its early proponents, in fact, was Benjamin Whorf.

“The world,” Whorf wrote, “is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way — an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language.”

Like the colour studies, many tests were done on Navajo speakers, but pretty much all of them failed to show that a strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis can exist. After all, Noam Chomsky and his crew have pretty much shown that grammars — all grammars — are simply variations of something fundamental, something that’s hardwired into the brain of each and every human being no matter what language they speak.

But there’s much more to language than grammar, and there’s got to be something in the ideas of Sapir and Whorf. It’s just a matter of common sense to believe that when we think in a language — English, say — the peculiarities of that language may serve to shape our thoughts … or if not our thoughts exactly, something about our way of being in the world. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis says we can’t think outside of the box that is our language. A more acceptable theory is simply to admit there is a box, whether or not we think outside of it.

And that’s the essence of linguistic relativity.

From the town of Santa Fe in New Mexico you can see a silver line of mountains — the Sangre de Cristo range. These mountains are the southernmost spur of the Rocky Mountains. It’s here that the spine of the continent finally peters out.

I’d come down in January, hoping to escape winter. The photos I’d seen of New Mexico showed a red rock desert with stunted spruces and cactus-like shrubbery. It was a pretty, sun-splashed place, so I was a little surprised to step off the airplane and into an icy blast of wind. What I hadn’t counted on was the altitude. Sante Fe is more than two thousand metres high. While the afternoons at least approximated warmth, the mornings and evenings were bone-crackingly cold.

I’d come down to meet up with an old friend once again. Lesley, the English doctor, the one I’d travelled through Italy with, was here visiting her father. He was a physicist from Oxford University, and he, too, had his reasons for being here.

Lesley picked me up at the airport, and we drove down into the centre of the old town. We walked into the central plaza. At one end is the Palace of the Governors, an old adobe structure that dates back to 1610. Out front, under a colonnade, a long line of women hunched under blankets, selling copper and turquoise jewellery. Most of them were Pueblo Indian, but a few were Hopi, and a couple of the women at one end were Navajo.

We shuffled along, looking at their wares. I bought a few things, and we chatted merrily with the old women. They all had faces that were darkened and cracked by the sun, but their nimble hands darted over the blankets, offering up this or that piece of jewellery. I asked them about the designs and found out that many of them were hundreds of years old, shapes that were carved into the rock in the surrounding canyons, petroglyphs of strange humpbacked stick figures, of turtles and rabbits and eagles. One set of earrings had a spiral pattern that was the Hopi symbol of migration.

Lesley and I pored over the stuff, buying bits and baubles for the people back home. A man in the square was roasting corn over a brazier, and that got me thinking again. The Navajo root word for corn is . It’s a word that didn’t exist for the Northern Dene or the Tsuu T’ina. The entire concept of agriculture simply didn’t exist on the northern plains, but it’s central to the Navajo (and to the Hopi, of course), so here was another little litmus test for language. Corn is as basic to these people’s lifestyles as the buffalo were to the Tsuu T’ina. It’s the very building block of their culture.

The Navajo still have a word for buffalo — ayání — a term closely related to the old Tsuu T’ina. Evidently, it’s a word that followed the southward migration of the Dene people, even though there are no buffalo in the Navajo lands.

Lesley and I went over to where the man was selling roasted corncobs, and Lesley turned to me. “Did you know,” she asked, “that the Hopi have over a hundred words for corn?”

“Oh, good God!” I groaned.

“What?” Lesley looked at me, puzzled. “What did I say?”

We drove north and west of Santa Fe, past a place called Los Alamos. It’s right on the edge of the Navajo lands. Even as we wound down the road toward it, something about the name jogged at my memory. Los Alamos. Why did that sound so familiar? Then it came to me.

Los Alamos is where Americans built and exploded the first atomic bomb. During the dying days of the Second World War, Robert Oppenheimer and his team unleashed a new kind of weapon, one that forever changed the world.

Los Alamos today is an unremarkable little town. Two fingers of land — the south mesa and the north mesa — stick out over a series of dusty ravines. At the edge of the south mesa the Los Alamos National Laboratory still rises above the hoodoos. It continues to draw some of the top physicists in the world, and yes, there’s still a lot of research being done on nuclear weapons, though they don’t actually explode them here anymore. Given the times, there’s a lot of security. The research facilities are very much off limits and very top secret.

Of course, anyone who’s ever read much about the Second World War knows that it was a conflict won thanks to superior technological development — well, superior technological development and knowing what the other guy was up to. Spying and code-breaking played almost as big a role as the technology, and one of the best of these stories involved the Navajo.

In 1942, even before the Manhattan Project was initiated, the Navajo were enlisted in the war effort in a way no one possibly could have imagined. Twenty-nine Navajo men were recruited to put together a code that was never broken by the Germans or the Japanese. These Navajo men were known as Windtalkers. That name comes from the Navajo word for wind — honí3ch’i — which also refers to a person’s soul or life force.

The code they developed consisted of two parts: a sort of alphabet based on Navajo words and a short dictionary of manufactured slang. The alphabet part worked in much the same way that military radio operators have always worked. “Alpha” stands for the letter A. “Charlie” stands for C, and so on. Now the Navajo code took that a step farther, using Navajo translations so that A became wol-la-chee, which is the Navajo word for ant. B became shush, or bear in Navajo. C became moasi, the Navajo word for cat.

To make things run more quickly, though, a list of common words was drawn up and coded into an invented slang. A bomb in the Windtalker code became a-ye-shi, which in Navajo means “egg.” A fighter plane was da-he-tih-hi, “hummingbird,” and a tank was chayda gahi, “tortoise.” For the navy a battleship was lo-tso, “whale,” while a destroyer was ca-lo, “shark,” and a submarine was besh-lo, literally “iron fish.”

After the war, it took a long time for the Navajo Windtalkers to be recognized. The code was kept officially classified until 1968, and it wasn’t until 1981 that the Navajo part in the war was formally honoured. Many of the Windtalkers (and there were almost four hundred of them by the end of the war) died without receiving any sort of military pension. But their part in the war effort was enormous. The code played a huge role in campaigns such as the Battle of Iwo Jima. It was used right until the end of the war when two very big “eggs,” atomic bombs, were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Languages really are a sort of code, one that a set number of people have agreed upon, whether it’s a few dozen Tsuu T’ina speakers, a hundred thousand Navajo, or five hundred million English speakers.

“Every language,” Benjamin Whorf wrote, “is a vast pattern-system … by which the personality not only communicates, but also analyzes nature, channels its reasoning, and builds the house of consciousness.” It’s those last three words that are important —House of Consciousness.

Each language is different. They encode things from our particular environments like snow or buffalo or corn, but it’s more than that. There are subtleties in the understandings. There are metaphors, connotations, and social constructions that go far beyond the simple assigning of a word to a thing.

And that’s the point. Our thinking isn’t constrained by our language — there are just too many other semiotic systems at play — but our language is the central encoder and processor of the information that our brains receive from the outside world. It’s the frame for our House of Consciousness. It’s the load-bearing wall, and as such it helps to create our immediate personal experience of the world, our phenomenological sense of our everyday lives. It’s the world we inhabit and the very root of linguistic relativity. It is, once again, our Palace of Words.

The Navajo are still a large and powerful group of people. They’ve managed to hang on to many of their ceremonial systems in the face of a strange new world, a realm of skyscrapers and nuclear weapons. Many Navajo continue to live in mud-walled hogans … and their code hasn’t been broken yet.

The Navajo belief system is unbelievably complex. Even different groups within the Navajo community approach things in slightly different ways. But perhaps that’s how it should be. There’s nothing neat and tidy about life. Defining whole worlds can’t help but get a bit messy.

There’s at least one thing, though, that all Navajo would recognize, and that’s the singular importance of the phrase S1’áh naagháí bik’eh hózhó — the same phrase I tried out at the Navajo barbecue in Alberta with the guys in the Winnebago. I didn’t know it then, but it turns out that the phrase is a textbook case of linguistic relativity. It’s almost impossible to adequately translate it into English but, seeing as I’m already into it up to my eyeballs, I’ll give it my best shot.

Now bear with me here.

is a derivative of the past tense verb to grow or to mature. Naagháí, meanwhile, is one of about 356,200 distinct inflected forms of the verb to go (it’s the singular form of the third person of the continuative-imperfective mode, if you really want to know), and it refers to a continuous going about and returning. When talking about a person, it means unendingly walking around, the metaphor being that we walk through life. Bik’eh is the simplest of the words in the phrase. It just means “according to” or “by its decree.”

And then there’s hózhó which, in truth, would take pages and pages of English to even come close to describing. Hózhó is often translated as “beauty,” though it’s much more than that. It includes everything that a Navajo thinks of as being good. Beauty, yes, but also perfection, harmony, goodness, normality, success, well-being, and order … an idea perhaps not unlike the Chinese concept of Tao.

So a simple translation of the entire phrase — one that leaves out all the allusions and connotations, all the richness of a thousand years of experience — would be something akin to a wish to unendingly move along a path of goodness well into one’s maturity and old age.

The phrase is the centrepiece of one of the most important of all Navajo ceremonies — what in English is called the Blessingway chant. The Blessingway chant goes on for days, and it’s designed to right the world, to bring the world or the individual back into balance, back into harmony and goodness.

The full phrase, though, isn’t only for religious ceremonies. It’s also used in everyday Navajo life. A Navajo uses this concept to express his happiness and his health. It’s employed to remind people to be careful, and a shortened version of it is even used to say goodbye to someone.

To be poetic (because sometimes poetry can do things that normal prose can’t), we might even reduce it all to this: “May you always walk the trail of beauty.”

And that’s something I like very much.

We all walk, I suppose, down these long trails of beauty, these long lines of history. We have been cast across continents and oceans and we have named them all. We have conjured up countless worlds in a thousand different tongues.

We are symbol-smiths. We are the spinners of tales. We are the builders — and memory keepers — of entire civilizations. And with our languages we call ourselves into being and sparkle, for a time, like stars over a dark and silent world.