Decompiling Oppression #26
Sam McVeety
As we look towards a new year, I hope that these words will provide new ways and invitations for how to hold the tensions that suffuse our lives. I'd like to end the year with something that is simultaneously meditative, hopeful, and honest. For me, Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass is all of these things and more, as she explores and deepens our understanding of the world through the braided traditions of native ways of knowing and the scientific method. In her words:
I wanted readers to understand that Indigenous knowledge and Western science are both powerful ways of knowing, and that by using them together we can imagine a more just and joyful relationship with the Earth.
Her book is a thoughtful reflection on seeing things through a both/and approach, when so little of our world can be understood through clear binaries. Sometimes that is the mundane, like her desire to be thoughtful about the source of the goods that she buys (while also occasionally wanting to just be able to get something to eat without succumbing to decision paralysis). Other times, it is profoundly affecting, exploring language, oppression, and generational struggle.
One of my favorite parts of her writing concerns the structure of language itself. In her language of Potawatomi, there is a "grammar of animacy" that inverts the familiar share of verbs to nouns, in favor of vastly more verbs (in English, there are overwhelmingly more nouns than verbs). The effect of this is that the natural world takes on a fundamentally greater degree of agency, as both non-human living things are afforded verbs of their own (e.g. a verb for "to be a rabbit") as well as inanimate objects ("to be a bay"). Seeing the world through the possibility of this lens raises deep questions around how we might change our behavior, both with each other, and with the world around us, with this way of seeing.
One of the best ways perhaps to see what it is is to say at first what our native language English is not. You know how in English we refer to each other as persons, but if we referred to that maple tree outside our windows, we would have to refer to it in English as it. In English you’re either human, or you’re an object. But in Potawatomi this grammar of animacy means that we have the linguistic structure to speak of the living world as if it were alive, as if it was a person, as if it were our family- because in our way of thinking, it is.
In another exceptional passage of the book, she finds humor and humility in what starts as a small act of love, endeavoring to "clean" a pond for her children, which blossoms into fundamental questions of what it means to find or create beauty in the natural world. Left untouched by humans, the "natural" course of a pond is to gradually settle and become marsh. What, then, does that mean for a mother who wants to provide a place for her daughter to swim in sparkling clear water? As she wages a campaign against the muck and algae that inexorably push back on her efforts to displace them, she delights in embodying this tension in miniature, between leaving a mark on the natural world and letting "nature take its course".
Her world is not free of disappointment. As she seeks to answer questions that many of her colleagues in academia have deemed irrelevant or foolish, she experiences racism and misogyny, meeting her curiosity with disdain. Nevertheless, she persists, asking why a hillside awash with wildflowers appears to prefer purple and gold hues (answer: the visible spectrum available to bees' eyes), or under what conditions the eponymous sweetgrass thrives (answer: it grows most rapidly when partially harvested, neither stripped bare nor left alone). In this latter example, she situates a beautiful metaphor for her own evolving relationship with the natural world -- a shifting mutuality of harmony and balance.
Here are this week's invitations:
Personal: Think about areas in your life where you experience tension between two values. Reflect on how you've been able to still make progress in spite of these apparent conflicts.
Communal: It's now been a year (!) since this journey of Decompiling Oppression began. Are there any previous topics that have inspired you to have a deeper community conversation? What would you like to see in 2021? Please feel free to share this material with others in your community, and send feedback by email or anonymously.
Solidarity: Support Dr. Kimmerer's Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, which is dedicated to creating programs that draw on the wisdom of both indigenous and scientific knowledge in support of our shared goals of environmental sustainability.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
FAQ
Can I share this newsletter with non-Googlers? Yes! Feel free to forward this note externally; it does not contain confidential information.
Is this an official Google newsletter? Nope. The views expressed in this newsletter are not the official position of Google, and we are not affiliated with any particular ERG.
I am leaving Google or transferring to another bet. Can I still receive this newsletter? Yes! You can join the external list here.