Page 23 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue2
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When Earth Becomes an “It”
When the people call the Earth “Mother,”
They take with love
And with love give back
So that all may live.
When the people call Earth “it,”
They use her
Consume her strength. Then the people die.
Already the sun is hot
Out of season.
Our Mother’s breast
Is going dry.
She is taking all green
Into her heart
And will not turn back
Until we call her
By her name.
I’m a beginning student of my native Anishinaabe language, trying to reclaim what was washed from
the mouths of children in the Indian Boarding schools. Children like my grandfather. So I’m paying a lot
of attention to grammar lately. Grammar is how we chart relationships through language, including our
relationship with the Earth.
Imagine your grandmother standing at the stove in her apron and someone says, “Look, it is making
soup. It has gray hair.” We might snicker at such a mistake, at the same time that we recoil. In English,
we never refer to a person as “it.” Such a grammatical error would be a profound act of disrespect. “It"
robs a person of selfhood and kinship, reducing a person to a thing.
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