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Bawaajimo
A DIALECT OF DREAMS IN ANISHINAABE LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE
By MARGARET NOODIN Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 2014 Margaret Noodin
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61186-105-1
CHAPTER 1
Anishinaabemowin: The Anishinaabe Language
Kchigaming, miskwaasini'ing, maashkodeng miinwa mitigwaakiing mii sa Anishinaabewakiing.
The Great Inland sea, the swamp, the grasslands and the forest are all Anishinaabe country.
Although the Anishinaabe people are oft en called a "woodland" culture, there is much more to Anishinaabe identity. The center of Anishinaabewakiing, or Anishinaabe country, is the life-giving gaming, the "vast water." The roll of "g" against "m" is still heard when people speak of Lake Superior as Gichi Gumee, the biggest, most kchi, of all seas. The sound is also echoed in the word Michigami, which appeared on Vincenzo Coronelli's map Partie Occidentale du Canada ou de la Nouvelle France in 1688 and became the name Henry Schoolcraft gave to the territory that became a state in 1837. Anishinaabe elders still say that all the lakes, now named separately, once shared a single name and identity, Chigaming.
Beyond the water are miskwaasini'ing, the swamp, and mashkodeng, the grassland. In these words are echoes of miskwa (blood), mashkiki (medicine), and mashkawizi (strength). This middle ground between the bays and rivers is important and an indelible part of Anishinaabe culture. One does not move from the mutable seas to the stationary pines without traveling the land between. On the other side of the circle is mitigwaakiing, the woodlands, which blends several descriptive concepts including mitg (tree), aagawaakwaa (to shade someone), and aki, commonly translated as "land" but closely related to akina, the term for "everything" or "unity."
Anishinaabeg / The Anishinaabe People
Anishinaabe language and culture is more than the woodlands, more than the lakes, more than artifacts and ceremonies. It is also the sound of a language that continues to evolve in this place among these people. A billion years ago continents fused, 500 million years ago a shift occurred, and over 5,000 years ago ice formed then melted. These distant events are chronicled in Anishinaabe stories of cataclysmic change and flooding (Grady). Traditional tales describe these vast seas without ever mentioning migration from the area of the Bering Strait, which, Vine Deloria Jr. points out, is an omission "to be taken seriously" (Spirit and Reason 92). Careful readers will see connections between Western science and indigenous narratives, between maps of land and the etymology of language and culture. Language and culture overlap, and sites of inquiry are more complex and diverse than at first imagined.
Many indigenous languages are now endangered, and at the core of most language revitalization is the belief that the language reflects the culture, and cultural practices are connected to identity, and place exerts some level of influence over both language and culture. These are complex claims that have been debated for years. What I aim to do here is explore the truth of these ideas while taking into account both community wisdom and academic scholarship. In the examples that began this chapter, it is clear the words to describe Anishinaabe habitat are connected to concepts of what is required to thrive. Mary Isabelle Young beautifully summarizes the community perception of language and worldview. In her book Pimatisiwin: Walking in a Good Way, she shares her own belief that "as aboriginal people we look at things our own way [and] a lot of that is rooted in the language" (115). Like many Anishinaabe people striving to keep the language alive, she finds this idea echoed across genders and generations and in venues of all kinds. Participants in her study repeatedly connect concepts of grammar and morphology to worldview and well-being. Nouns are not simply classified in two categories; they are "infused with spirit" that one informant, Aanung, explained as a connection between language and worldview. "We see all living things as having spirit and I don't believe we worship these things. It's just that we have a relationship with them as living beings and we respect them" (Young 139). Leroy Littlebear puts it another way when he talks about his language: "What I carry around is a combination of words. We become skillful at combinations.... The language encompasses all of the following: a constant flux, moving, recombining, energy waves, spirit, animate, relations, renewal and land. ... I believe that if I do not speak the Anishinaabe language the way my Father taught me, I am underestimating the life force and the spiritual significance of the language" (Young 29). Furthermore, teacher Shirley Williams maintains that we need to move the language into the future so that life as it is lived now can be encompassed by the Anishinaabe language. "Language is a living thing that evolves with the times. Some things are hard to describe, but ... we are in the new Millennium and although this has never been done before, it is urgent that speakers coin new words to describe such things as Plexiglass or a time clock" (Burnaby and Reyhner 223).
These explanations at first seem emotional or spiritual, but time and again they relate to specific points of grammar, morphology, syntax, and semiotics. Studies in the philosophy of language explore the way worlds are described and truth is communicated through language. I would suggest that indigenous linguistics might advance studies in this area, as metaphors and meaning are mapped differently in societies with alternate values and perspectives. Language is a social practice, co-created and constantly re-created by users who build circuits of understanding. These patterns of language should be as fully explored as possible when reading indigenous literature. Story, sound, and meaning cannot be separated from one another, or from the people who communicate with them. As Roger Spielmann concludes in his book on Anishinaabe discourse analysis: "If a person loses his or her language, lost also are the ideas and culture-specific ways of relating to each other" (239). These culture-specific ways of using language are reflected in the stories of the Anishinaabe people.
The word Anishinaabe can be translated as "original one" or the "first good human being lowered here" and is the term understood by Native speakers to be the most accurate description of the people who share a language and culture in the Great Lakes region (Vollum and Vollum 274; T. Smith 6). Nishin is still used both formally and informally as a term for one who is "doing well" or something that happens in a good way. Naabe is the term for one half of the creation equation. It is used to denote male versus female, but will also sound to speakers like the small term added when something is put "right here." Of course there is no way to say what the first speaker meant by the term, and Anishinaabe names and words are infamously mercurial, but fluent speakers revel in the intellectual paradigms and possibilities. To pretend there is one supreme interpretation is contrary to the spirit of the language itself.
As an ethnic and political term, Anishinaabe has a long history, considerably predating such commonly used terms as Ojibwe or Chippewa, which seem to be of eighteenth-century origin. The 1795 Treaty of Greenville refers to "the Chippewas," and William Warren noted in 1852, "'Chippewa' does not date far back. As a race or distinct people they denominate themselves Anishinabe [sic]" (14). In the 1960s, through the efforts of Gerald Vizenor and others, the word Anishinaabe made its return to popular discourse. In Vizenor's words, "Today the people named odjibwa, otchipwe, ojibway, chippewa, chippeway and 'indian' still speak of themselves in the language of their religion as the Anishinabe [sic] (Everlasting Sky 11). Vizenor's effort to make the term Anishinaabe more prevalent in both Native and non-Native circles has met with success and was echoed by counterparts in Canadian communities.
According to traditional stories, Gichi Manidoo, the Great Spirit, took four parts of Mother Earth (perhaps the soil of the lakebed, the swamp, the prairie, and the woods) and blew into them using a sacred shell. "From the union of his breath with the elements, man was created" and then lowered to earth (Benton-Banai 3). Tradition holds that Gichi Manidoo placed the first people slightly east of the land they now inhabit. Much later they migrated to the land surrounding Lake Superior (Vecsey, "The Ojibwa Creation Myth" 12). Anishinaabe communities are now estimated to number over 500,000 people living in an area extending east to west from Lake Ontario to Lake Winnipeg and north to south from the Severn River basin in Canada to the Wabash River basin in America. Many more Anishinaabe people have migrated with family, toward work, to urban communities and are reflected as a growing population in the U.S. census.
The earliest written records of the Anishinaabe were compiled by French and English missionaries and explorers who came to North America in the 1600s. The immigrants imagined they were discovering a "new" world, when in truth they became "cocreators of a world in the making" (R. White 518). By the seventeenth century, warfare, disease, the economy of fur trading, and the rising number of immigrant settlements had changed the Anishinaabe landscape irrevocably. The cultural collision of this period is preserved in the oral stories of the Anishinaabe and in the writings of the foreign men who walked among them, including Nicolas Perrot, Alexander Henry, Frederic Baraga, and Henry Rowe Schoolcraft.
Anishinaabe communities are part of what is now North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ontario, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan. As people living in a shared place, migrating from the east to the west of the lakes, the Anishinaabeg were known as a confederacy of several ethnicities and many small communities. Theirs was the Th ree Fires Confederacy, and they are considered indigenous to the Great Lakes because theirs is the oldest living memory that has survived in this place. Early in the 1600s Champlain began to use the name Algonquian, which has been traced to either the Micmac phrase algoomeaking ("place of eel spearing") or the Maliseet term elaegomogwik ("they are our relatives"). In the early 1800s Henry Schoolcraft further complicated matters by combining the terms Allegheny and Atlantic to create "Algic." Embedded in these tangled linguistic roots is at least a kernel of undeniable truth: there were multiple large groups of people, whose languages and practices were distinct enough to be sometimes unintelligible, yet recognizably connected in practice and community. Today, linguists classify Anishinaabemowin as one of 27 Algonquian languages and acknowledge it as the ancestral language of over 200 communities in the United States and Canada. This broad group is sometimes divided into three parts indicating the languages used in the plains and in the central and eastern parts of North America. Anishinaabemowin is part of the central group that also includes Cree, Miami, Menominee, Naskapi, Shawnee, Fox, and Sauk, among others, and speakers of these central languages can oft en easily understand one another and share storytelling traditions.
The Anishinaabe have always insisted on their distinctiveness as a people. In 1885, when his book History of the Ojibway Nation was published, mixed-blood Anishinaabe interpreter and legislator William Warren noted:
During my long residence among the Ojibways, after numberless inquiries of their old men, I have never been able to learn, by tradition or otherwise, that they entertain the belief that all the tribes of the red race inhabiting America have ever been, at any time since the occupancy of this continent, one and the same people, speaking the same language, and practicing the same beliefs and customs. ... There are differences amongst its inhabitants and contrarieties as marked and fully developed as are to be found between European and Asiatic nations—wide differences in language, beliefs and customs. (60)
Early maps indicate the edges of linguistic groups, paths of trade and shifting political alliances. Today many smaller sovereign nations exist where once a more connected confederacy controlled the region. Despite modern quantums and linear descriptions of descendancy, families are still defined in broad strokes, and clan affiliations remain in place as networks that defy time and modern templates. Anishinaabe people see themselves as connected in many ways to one another.
Anishinaabemowin / The Anishinaabe Language
Anishinaabemowin is the language of the Three Fires Confederacy, a political construct that has shift ed in use over time. Most speakers today understand Odawa, Potawatomi, and Ojibwe to be ethnic communities present in many combinations on various reservations, while the term Anishinaabe connects the broader linguistic and cultural community. Each of the ethnic groups has its own dialectal and cultural identity. Odawa stems from the word adaawe, meaning to trade. The term "Potawatomi" references the word boodwedi, the act of working to build a fire together. Some say the term "Ojibwe" stems from the word jibakwe (to cook or roast) because the people wore moccasins that were puckered at the toe. However, it is possibly more productive to connect the initial sound jib to such other words as jibwa, meaning "before," and jiibay, meaning ghost, which carry implications of the past. In fact jibakwe itself connects back to the concept of putting a plate out for the jiibayag (the ancestors who came before us), which makes sense because the role of remembering or retelling stories is the role most oft en associated with the Ojibwe. In her travel memoir, Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country, Erdrich herself extends this analogy, connecting the term ojibwe to the word ozhibii'ige, which is the verb for "he or she writes" (11). Some of the stories other Anishinaabe authors write might continue this exploration of sound and meaning to consider the echoes of the crane clan centered at the place of the rapids, the jijaakwag onjibaaweting.
The term Anishinaabe is a verb in the language and becomes a sentence when conjugated: Nd'Anishinaabe/I am Anishinaabe. Adding mo to the end of the verb means "to speak as an Anishinaabe": Nd'anishinaabemomin/We speak Anishinaabe. Adding taw changes the form of the verb and implies a speaker and listener: Gd'anishinaabemtawigo/We all speak Anishinaabe to you. Adding win to the word makes it a noun. This transformation may seem tangled to an English speaker, but it is a window into a world of meaning shaped by action and addition rather than presence and pronouns. The slip of definition between seeing language as a noun and having a way to peel it back to a common verb is the difference between cultures. To say, "I speak English" or "Je parle français" requires use of a pronoun that stands alone and a verb, "speak" or parle, to say what is happening with that thing, the language, "English" or français. To convey a similar message regarding Anishinaabemowin, I say nd'anishinaabem as one word with the pronoun nd (I) added to the front and the win noun indicator removed. Other speakers in the region might say nd'ojibwem or n'boodewaadmiimomin to indicate they are speaking the language of their Ojibwe or Potawatomi community. This shift ing of verbs depends on understanding the changes that occur at the center of the message, rather than positioning of subjects and objects. Of course there are times when an object is desired, as in "I love you," Je t'aime, G'zaagin. Watching that phrase move from three separate words in English to two words and an enclitic pronoun in French to a single transitive animate verb in Anishinaabemowin is like watching clouds come together. In this and several other ways, including noun classes and negation, French is closer to Anishinaabemowin than English. It is not the subject of this book, but one does wonder if that had any subtle influence on the course of history. Regardless of that particular debate, it is clear that the way meaning is constructed differs from one culture to another, and ideas of possession, classification, positioning, and accuracy can differ greatly.
To build theories and identify aesthetic trends based on language, it is important to know the sound and rhythm of Anishinaabemowin. Many Anishinaabe authors find in the language an echo of the place. Ignatia Broker wrote in her memoir of an Ojibwe childhood, Night Flying Woman: "When the forest weeps, the Anishinaabe who listen will look back at the years. In each generation of Ojibway there will be a person who will hear the si-si-gwa-d who will listen and remember and pass it on to the children" (1). In Anishinaabe culture trees have long been considered markers of meeting places and messengers to other dimensions. Desperate women and young warriors sometimes become trees in Anishinaabe stories. Little people known as apa'iinsag capture children and teach them lessons under trees. When Broker urges young people to "listen to the trees" she is not only asking that they hear the pattern of syllables and dance of vowels between the consonants, she is also asking them to listen for meaning not always on the surface. In the words chosen for the tree names, or words used for the actions associated with certain trees, there are networks of meaning in the sounds that should not be ignored. If we listen, the trees tell us who they are: zesegawandag, zhingwaak, mitigomizh, ninatig, azaadi, wiigwaas, giizhik (white spruce, white pine, oak, maple, aspen, birch, cedar). The numerous vowels, absence of "l" and "r" and presence of consonant pairs "zh," "gw," and "nd" mark the words as Anishinaabemowin. Helen Fuhst and her brother Stanley Peltier, who have been teaching the language for many years, say there are meanings in the sounds that cannot be forgotten. Fuhst has written a book about a sound-based method of language instruction with the subtitle Nisosataagaadeg Akina Initaagawaziwinan E-Noondaagaadegin E-Akidoong Akiodoowining ("understand all the sounds that are heard, that are said in words"). Knowledge of sounds can help explain definitions. For example, ozhaawashkwaande is hard to define in English. It has come to stand for "green" most oft en, but elders will say it once was used for both blue and green and represents all the blue and green of fir needles, sage leaves, the place where lakes merge, or that spot on the horizon where water becomes sky. Others may hear different images in these sounds, but the Anishinaabeg have built connections between words, an audible etymology, that causes the mind to leap in a certain way from one image to another. Only the most fluent speakers can understand all of these implications and connections, but it is something students can aspire to and readers should recognize.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Bawaajimo by MARGARET NOODIN. Copyright © 2014 Margaret Noodin. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
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