This blog on Texas education contains posts on accountability, testing, K-12 education, postsecondary educational attainment, dropouts, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, environmental issues, Ethnic Studies at state and national levels. It also represents my digital footprint, of life and career, as a community-engaged scholar in the College of Education at the University of Texas at Austin.
Language Carries More Than Words. An Interview of Ojibwe Scholar David Treuer
Epistemology, or ways of knowing, is a concept that is oftentimes hard to grasp because it's hard for us to imagine ourselves outside of our current ways of knowing. Though not always, one tends to grasp it more readily if you speak two or more languages.
Certain concepts, ideas, and the feelings that accompany them, particularly in the realm of identity caught up with a deeps sense of history and place, simply cannot be fully translated. Hence, the importance of language and cultural preservation and revitalization.
The interview transcript appears below. However, I encourage you to hear his interview with Krista Tippett in this On Being podcast.
Writer David Treuer’s
work tells a story that is richer and more multi-dimensional than the
American history most of us learned in school. Treuer, who grew up on
the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota, helped compile the
first practical grammar of the Ojibwe people. He says the recovery of
tribal languages and names is part of a fuller recovery of our national
story — and the human story. And it holds unexpected observations
altogether about language and meaning that most of us express
unselfconsciously in our mother tongues.
Krista Tippett, host: David Treuer’s book The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee
has been nominated for a National Book Award. When I spoke with him in
2008, he was in the midst of a fascinating project with his brother, the
linguist Anton Treuer, to compile the first practical grammar of the
Ojibwe people. This conversation speaks gently and beautifully to why
the recovery of tribal languages and names is part of a fuller recovery
of our national story and the human story. And it holds unexpected
observations altogether about language and meaning that most of us
express unselfconsciously in our mother tongues. [music: “Seven League Boots” by Zoë Keating] This is what Ojibwe sounds like. Keller Paap: Wiindamawishin. Dazhindan wayaabandaman [Tell me. Talk about what you see.] Child: Niwaabandaan nibi. [I see water.] Mr. Paap: Dibi? [Where?] Child: Imaa. [There.] Mr. Paap: Aaniin ezhinikaadaman i’iw? [What do you call that?] Child: Ziibiins. [Creek.] Mr. Paap: Ziibiins. Awenen endanakiid imaa? Awiya na? [A creek. Who lives there? Anybody?] Child: Omakakii, giigoowensag … [A frog, little fish … ] Ms. Tippett: I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. David Treuer splits his time between Los Angeles and the Leech Lake
Reservation in northern Minnesota. He grew up there, the son of an
Ojibwe mother and a Jewish-Austrian father. He went away to study at
Princeton and then returned to the reservation, where he learned the
Ojibwe language for the first time as an adult. Ms. Tippett: As we begin, let’s just — language around this whole subject is so complicated. Mr. Treuer: It is. Ms. Tippett: I will confess, actually, I had not
realized, until I dug into this — and I didn’t grow up in this part of
the country, but I don’t know if that’s an excuse; I grew up in
Oklahoma. [laughs] Mr. Treuer: [laughs] Then it may not be an excuse, then. Ms. Tippett: Well, I know, but I grew up in a place called Shawnee, in Potawatomi County, and Tecumseh was next door. Mr. Treuer: Wow. Ms. Tippett: But Ojibwe I don’t remember hearing about — but anyway, that Ojibwe and Chippewa are, in fact, the same. Mr. Treuer: They are the same. Ms. Tippett: I had no idea of that. And then, of
course, the more fraught phrase is in terms of how the larger culture
speaks about Native people. Do you refer to yourself as Indian or Native
American? And why does it matter, to you? Mr. Treuer: Well, it matters greatly for a lot of
people. For me, I don’t — this seems kind of funny, being a writer and
being a language guy — those phrases aren’t as important to me as
“Ojibwe,” “Anishinaabe,” and so on; those phrases that we have for
ourselves in our own language. One of my cousins came up with a great phrase for me. He said, “You
know, since you’re Indian, you’d be Anishinaabe. But since you’re Jewish
and Indian, I think we should call you ‘Jewishinaabe.’” [laughs] Yeah, that’s my cousin. Ms. Tippett: [laughs] And you write a lot about how much association and imagery the word “Indian” contains in an American imagination … Mr. Treuer: It does. Ms. Tippett: …and not just in an American imagination, the global imagination, and that this gets in the way of really understanding. Mr. Treuer: It does. We live wearing really elaborate disguises not really of our own devising. Ms. Tippett: You mean, “we” — Indians? You mean you and your people? Mr. Treuer: Sure, that we live beyond and behind
these ideas about what a “real Indian” is or a “traditional Indian” or
what reservation life “is like.” And the ideas that people have about
these things are typically poorly informed ideas and ideas drawn from
the Indian of the imagination, James Fenimore Cooper’s Indians or the
Indians one finds in Dances With Wolves, and so on. So our lives, their
real dimensions, which I think are interesting and beautiful, often
escape notice. Ms. Tippett: You know what strikes me is that
language is a carrier of our sense of self, the way we use it, the way
we experience it. But it seems to me that, for most people, that is
unconscious. And you have been somehow forced or compelled to become
conscious of that, to reckon with it. Mr. Treuer: To reckon with language? Ms. Tippett: And with how intimately connected it is with who you are at a profound level, not just in what you could say in a sentence. Mr. Treuer: Yeah. I wasn’t raised with very much of
the language at all, through no fault of my mother or my grandparents on
her side of the family. My grandmother was sent to boarding school in
Tomah, Wisconsin, at age 4, and I don’t think she was allowed home until
she was 10. She left as a monolingual Ojibwe speaker; she came back as a
monolingual English speaker. And so there was a government program in
process that tried to divest Native people of their Native languages.
And really, very few people were untouched by that process. So I wasn’t
raised with much of the language, although all of the ceremonial doings
that my family took me to put me face-to-face with that language while
growing up, and I wanted that language to be part of me. And I should say that my older brother felt this more keenly and more
strongly and sooner than I did. And after he left — after he graduated
Princeton, he moved directly back home, and he devoted himself to
learning Ojibwe. I saw that. I saw him doing that, and I admired it so
much, and I wanted to have relationships with these elderly Ojibwe
people for whom English was a kind of secondhand clothing that they wore
in public, but it really didn’t define them. It didn’t make sense to
them. They didn’t express themselves well. And these were sort of these
precious people that I wanted to understand, not on my terms, not on my
college, Ivy League-educated terms. I wanted to understand them in their
terms, and I wanted to share them. And really the only way to do that
was through the language. There’s another aspect of it too, which is — and this is even more
important, I think, for a lot of native people who are involved in
language revitalization efforts, is that it’s always been ours. It’s
never been given to us. Our native languages aren’t forced on us. And
it’s a chance to define ourselves on and in our own terms and in ways
that have nothing to do with what’s been taken. We can define ourselves
by virtue of what we’ve saved. Ms. Tippett: So when you talk about language
revitalization — and I think you are referring to the same thing in a
positive way — when people talk about endangered languages, rescuing
endangered languages. But one of the things — when scientists do this or
anthropologists, you know, one of the things they’re trying to figure
out is how speech influences thought, whether grammar is innate or
learned, and how all of this forms who we are. I’m curious to hear from your knowledge and coming back to Ojibwe and
learning it as an adult, how you experience those propositions about
how language is about more than speech. One thing you said is that
Ojibwe is dominated by verbs. Mr. Treuer: Yes, it is. Ms. Tippett: That intrigues me. So what difference does that make? Mr. Treuer: Well, we’re going to talk loose here in ways that I think — who’s that linguist from MIT? He wrote The Language Instinct. Ms. Tippett: Is it Steven Pinker? Mr. Treuer: Steven Pinker, yes. So I’m going to talk
loose and easy in ways that Steven Pinker would not appreciate
probably. He thinks there is language instinct. He thinks grammar is
hard-wired and no languages contain a special way of knowing something
that another language wouldn’t contain. There are some interesting aspects of that argument, but what Ojibwe
affords in terms of how it inflects thought process, well, like you say,
it’s two-thirds verbs. It’s a very active, fluid language. But it
possesses a kind of nuance in terms of how it can create or describe and
then pose and reinvestigate actions and relationships between people
and things. Ms. Tippett: This is the kind of thing that,
especially in one’s mother tongue, you don’t even think about and I
don’t even know what the relationship is in terms of — what’s the
percentage of nouns to verbs in English. Mr. Treuer: I don’t know. Ms. Tippett: But can you give me an example of an
idea or a thought which would be transformed or nuanced in a different
way if you were saying it in Ojibwe by this prevalence of verbs? Mr. Treuer: Gosh, you asked me a really hard one. Ms. Tippett: OK, well, think of it … Mr. Treuer: … I can think of it — I mean, it’s
easier — I mean, maybe this is the nature of examples themselves. I can
think of it in terms of nouns. There is actually a little children’s
song that was recorded in the early part of the 19th century by Henry
Rowe Schoolcraft — or written down, that is. Then it was borrowed by
Longfellow in “The Song of Hiawatha,” and it’s about fireflies. There’s one line in that song — it’s really a children’s ditty — like
“London Bridges,” but an Ojibwe equivalent — where the word for firefly
is Wah-wah-taysee. [Ojibwe spoken] is the first line. A literal
translation would be “Firefly, firefly,” those are the first two words
in that line. In the last word, it changed “firefly” to a verb. So you
can make something a verb very easily in Ojibwe. So it’s basically
“Firefly, firefly, fire fly for me.” So it has a triple play, both “be yourself for me” and then “blink
and coast for me” and then just “fly for me,” at the same time. There’s a
kind of wordplay in that little children’s ditty, which is really a
wonderful example of the kind of magic in the language, where you can
make words do so many things at the same time. Now, you can do this with
any language. You can make words do double and triple duty that one
shouldn’t write, but Ojibwe does it in a way that I think is, that is
quite special. [music: “Love Song” by James Littlewolf] I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. Today with Ojibwe writer David Treuer. Ms. Tippett: Here’s another thing I noticed in your
writing. You talk about the namesake, the word, “namesake” that’s
important, really important, culturally, and that’s also connected to
the word for body. Mr. Treuer: Yeah. When you’re given an Ojibwe name,
you have seven, eight, nine namesakes. You have one person who’s running
the ceremony, and the others participate in the ceremony. The word for a
namesake, both the person running the ceremony and these other
attendants in the ceremony, is niiyawen’enh. Niiya is “my body,” the
idea being that when you’re giving somebody a name or receiving one,
you’re partaking in their soul. You’re basically gifting somebody a
portion of your soul, which will reside then in that other person’s
body. Ms. Tippett: And that is something that’s a piece of knowledge, a piece of your identity that you carry with you through your life? Mr. Treuer: Yeah, yeah. All those names, ’cause you
can get anywhere from just one to six or seven at that ceremony, which
usually occurs, ideally, when you’re quite young. So when you give
someone a name, you’re giving them part of your soul. And when you
accept a name, you’re both accepting the soul given and you’re giving
part of your own. So you’re connected in ways that are profound and
meaningful and communicated by the very word which the English
translation “namesake” doesn’t really cover. So those are the kind of
understandings which are obvious to the Ojibwe speakers. Ms. Tippett: In your novel, The Translation of Dr.
Apelles, he is described as a different person — feeling like a
different person when he speaks the language of his tribe and others. He
can joke, he can flirt, and then there’s this very evocative phrase.
You say, “These languages lend themselves to memory.” Explain that to
me. Mr. Treuer: Well, myths and ideas about Indian
people often obscure the true dimensions of our lives. And that’s very
much the case for Dr. Apelles. He’s kind of shy and not very stoic and a
little pudgy and super-smart, but not very personable, and lives in a
city and works as a librarian of sorts at a very strange library. His
life does not conform to any of the ideas that most people have about
Indian lives. And part of the reason is that those ideas are ideas that
people have, at least in the context of America, in English. So English is almost the language that we have for storytelling about
Indians. It’s almost his enemy. Or it’s certainly not helping him
express his truest self. It’s these other Native languages, which he
both had as a child and acquired as someone studying linguistics, that
he feels more comfortable in because he doesn’t have to do combat in
those languages with the trove of notions and icons and images and ideas
that attend Indians in English. In these native languages, he is
unburdened of all of those things. And he is — he becomes sort of newly
made in them, and it’s easier for him to more accurately remember his
past. Because the danger is for Native people, too, and also for my
character is that where it’s likely to misconstrue ourselves, perhaps,
in English. Ms. Tippett: And that does speak to this idea that a
language carries more than words. I mean, I think what you’re saying
also is that, while English can tell some of the narrative and the story
of what happened to Native people, certain memories are only going to
be kept alive in those tongues. Mr. Treuer: That’s true. And in the Ojibwe context,
two other things are kept alive in those tongues, two very important
things. One is ceremonial life. Ojibwe ceremonies are very rigidly
enforced. And this runs counter to the idea of native spirituality as
kind of an emotional and spiritual free-for-all where you just have to
feel it. You can just feel it, be it, and do it. Ojibwe ceremonies run
counter to that notion, where they’re really tightly controlled in some
ways. And orthodoxy plays a big part in those ceremonies, which really
doesn’t jive with idea. Ms. Tippett: Give me an example of what orthodoxy would be in a ceremony. Mr. Treuer: Two examples. One, in certain Ojibwe
ceremonies, you cannot do the ceremonies in any other language than
Ojibwe. Two, you cannot use any kind of modern form of technology to
preserve them. And you can’t talk about them either outside of the
ceremony. But you can talk about their reasons and rationale in that the
substance of the ceremony itself is largely concerned with the idea of
transmission and of human-to-human and spirit-to-human transmission of
knowledge and healing, as communicated through legends and songs and
procedures. So those ceremonies can’t be done in any other language.
They can’t be written down. They can’t be recorded. You can’t videotape
them. So if the language goes, those ceremonies, which are essential to
who we are, they go. [music: Leech Lake Intertribal Singers] Ms. Tippett: This is a live recording of the Leech
Lake Intertribal Singers performing at the Beltrami County Fairgrounds
in Bemidji, Minnesota. Mr. Treuer: In fact, there was an old man named
Archie Mosay. Archie was born in 1901. He started in his ceremonial
commitments when he was 14, in 1914, which he continued to his death in
1996. Archie was running one of these ceremonies, and my brother saw
this, where Archie was very frustrated that people weren’t understanding
what was supposed to be done in the ceremony. And he was frustrated
with the level of their commitment. He was very uncharacteristically
frustrated, because he was a very gentle, mellow, kind guy. So he left the ceremony enclosure, sort of a wigwam of sorts, and he
got up from his place in the wigwam and he walked outside and stood
there and he says in English, he said, “I had to come out here, because I
can’t use English in there. And I can’t use English in there, because
the spirit does not understand me when I speak English. But I want you
to understand me, and that’s why I’m speaking English.” Then he started
to sort of yell at people in English. So there’s that. But there’s also this issue of — and this is a
political issue too around language — of our sovereignty, of our tribal
sovereignty. Ms. Tippett: Ojibwe sovereignty, tribal sovereignty. Mr. Treuer: Yeah, yeah, tribal sovereignty. And Red
Lake Reservation, the Red Lake Nation, knows this so well. For example,
they were going to have a negotiation with the state of Minnesota over
some water rights, and they asked my brother to come up and interpret.
They’ve done this on a number of occasions. And what happened was, they
delivered their testimony in Ojibwe. My brother translated for the
representatives from Minnesota. Now all the people speaking Ojibwe also
spoke English very, very well. And so someone asked them, “Why do you
bother?” They said, “Well, it’s really important for them to remember
who we are. They tend to forget that. Well, this is a different nation.
We have a different language. This is just a reminder.” Ms. Tippett: You know, the statistics are pretty
daunting, generally, in terms of languages disappearing. Some have said
that half to 90 percent of the languages now spoken on earth might
disappear in this century. Mr. Treuer: Yeah, I’ve read that too. Ms. Tippett: On this continent, there were something
like 300 tribal languages at first contact with Europeans and now only —
I think you wrote this — only about 100 are left. Only a handful will
remain by the end of this century. Ojibwe will be one of those. Mr. Treuer: It will be. Ms. Tippett: Is there something in Ojibwe culture or language that has made it more tenacious? Mr. Treuer: I don’t think there’s anything. I
wouldn’t privilege the language in terms of something special about it
that has ensured its survival, but there are a couple factors. In fact,
it’s such a complicated language and it was, by the way, in The Guinness
Book of World Records as being the most difficult language to learn.
Now, I don’t know how do they decide? [laughs] OK, you’re job
is to learn every language and tell us, which one was — which one was
hardest. So I think actually it’s a vote against it. It’s a difficult,
complicated language. A given verb can have 4,000 different forms by the time you’re done
monkeying around with it. And that’s not an exaggeration. Someone did a
count. And so it’s actually a difficult, difficult language to come to
as a second language learner, which makes its survival a little more
precarious than a language that might be easier. I don’t know what
languages might be easy. All languages are both easy and hard. We all
acquire them, and they’re all difficult at a certain age. But I think what Ojibwe had in its favor, mostly, was geography —
that until very recently, our communities in the northern United States —
in Minnesota and Wisconsin and Michigan, but particularly in Ontario
and Manitoba — were incredibly hard to get to. Ms. Tippett: Really? You think that’s part of the explanation? Mr. Treuer: Hugely, a big, big, big, big part of it. Absolutely. Ms. Tippett: Because it was isolated? Mr. Treuer: Isolation helps, and there are reserves
in Canada that you can only get to by floatplane. Ojibwe reserves that
aren’t accessible by road. There are no roads, still to this day. And
everyone from the smallest child to the oldest adult speaks Ojibwe. And
it’s because these places are remote, it helps. Contact with work and
schools and churches and things like that and popular culture and the
kind of migrations that occur when you have a good highway system,
right? Ms. Tippett: Dangerous for languages, I guess. Mr. Treuer: It’s dangerous for languages. So is
satellite TV, which is very widely used on these remote reserves now, by
the way. So geography helps. And the ceremonies help too. This idea
that language and spirituality were so closely related they couldn’t be
separated, and for those Ojibwe people who remain traditional, who
didn’t want to convert to Christianity, language then became something
that they also held on to. Ms. Tippett: Here are some sounds of a classroom in northern Minnesota where students are taught exclusively in Ojibwe. [soundbite: classroom at an Ojibwe school] [music: “My New Friend” by New Roots Duo] Ms. Tippett: After a short break, more with David
Treuer. And you can find this show again in our Words Make Worlds
library at onbeing.org. We created libraries from our 15-year archive
for browsing or deep diving by theme — for teaching and reflection and
conversation. Find this and an abundance of more at onbeing.org. I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. Today with Ojibwe writer
David Treuer. He grew up on the Leech Lake Reservation in northern
Minnesota, where he learned the Ojibwe language for the first time as an
adult. And he’s been part of a larger movement to reintroduce it into
the life and education of the next generation. David Treuer’s story
illuminates why the recovery of tribal languages and names is part of a
fuller recovery of our national story and the human story. He’s written a
celebrated new book, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, that has
been nominated for a National Book Award. I interviewed him in 2008,
when he was in the midst of a massive language revitalization project
with his linguist brother. Ms. Tippett: So you and your brother Anton have
initiated this project to record, transcribe, and translate Ojibwe
speech, to compile the first practical Ojibwe language grammar. Tell me
how you’re going about that. Mr. Treuer: Slowly. The way we’re going about it is, we’re trying to capture as many different kinds of speech as we can. Ms. Tippett: And to do that, you are speaking with elder — usually, right? Elderly? Mr. Treuer: Yeah. Usually elderly, yeah. Ojibwe elders from Wisconsin and Minnesota and Ontario, mostly. Ms. Tippett: And you’re deciphering how the language works from hearing them speak it? Mr. Treuer: Yeah. I mean, we try to — and my
brother’s a lot better at this than I am, because he’s a lot more fluent
— but you try to maneuver the conversation into not often traveled
grammatical trails. Ms. Tippett: That’s interesting. Mr. Treuer: See, you try to maneuver it not just
saying, “Oh, this is what happened to me,” so you have a first person
past tense story. “When I was a kid, I went to the store and then I saw
him.” So you have first to third person. “Then he ran into this other
guy,” which brings you to a weird Ojibwe verb form, which is third
person to fourth person. You have a fourth person. Ms. Tippett: Well, how does that work, the fourth person? Mr. Treuer: Well, fourth person is, “he said to
him.” So someone who’s removed from the action of the story, but
involved, so it’s another remove in time or action. Those are very few,
but as opposed to, “Well, what we said to you all” was different than
“what they said to me,” and so you have, you know, second person plural
to first person, then third person plural to first person and then you
have sort of dubiative actions: “might have gone,” “should have” — you
know — “They might have come but didn’t.” There’s a whole special tense
for something that was going to happen, but never did. Ms. Tippett: Do we have that in English? Mr. Treuer: I don’t know that we have it with the same kind of precision that we have it in Ojibwe. Ms. Tippett: Right, and that sounds different. Mr. Treuer: So like, “I was going” is like “I’m
going [speaks Ojibwe].” “I went [speaks Ojibwe].” “I was going to go
[speaks Ojibwe].” “I was going to go but didn’t [speaks Ojibwe].” And
it’s still one word. What I spoke was not a sentence, but just a word,
which has sort of accreted all of these different parts. So the trick is
to gather as many different examples of our grammar as they occur
naturally in conversation, and from as many different places and
dialects as we can, and to then we collect them. We record them
basically and then transcribe, write them down, then translate into
English. Ms. Tippett: I’m curious. As you embarked on this
adventure of speaking with people and listening to them, what have you
discovered that you never expected, that has really broadened your
imagination about this word “Indian,” for example? Give me a story or a
particular people. Mr. Treuer: Yeah. There were these two guys who were
first cousins that we’re recording. They’re from a small village on the
Red Lake Reservation called Ponemah, which is a very remote village. It
held onto language and to traditional customs in ways that other
villages and other communities in the region had difficulty hanging
onto. But there are these two cousins, one guy named Tom Stillday —
everyone calls him Tommy J — and his cousin, Eugene Stillday. They’re
very different in terms of personality and outlook and so on. But we’ve
been recording them both, and we went to Tommy J’s house — he’s also my
daughter’s namesake, by the way. His cousin Eugene was telling the story about when he was a kid and
his family was laid low by the flu — his parents, siblings, everyone but
him — in this small shack, in the village of Ponemah, dead of winter,
snow is deep. And he describes sitting by the woodstove. He couldn’t get
the lantern going. His fingers were too cold, and he was too scared.
And he couldn’t get the kerosene lantern going. He must have been 8 or 9
years old. Everyone’s unconscious on the floor. People knew about the
flu. People died from it back then, especially Native people. This would
have been probably in the ’30s, late ’30s, maybe. And he described
sitting by the stove, which had a little grate on it, and that the only
light in the cabin was coming from the grate. He describes the way the flames were flickering and how he sat there
just holding onto that light as the one thing that was keeping him from
freaking out, and that it would light up in flashes his family, none of
whom were moving on the floor. And that all of a sudden, in comes Tommy
J’s father, Eugene’s uncle, who came in and then just took Eugene and
walked him through the snow back to his house and gave him some bread —
he hadn’t eaten in three days, he said — and some water and then went
back to Eugene’s family and stayed with them and kept the fire going and
got them healthy again and none of them passed away. None of them died. I don’t know, but what was special about it was just this sense of
family and kinship. Now, it didn’t have anything necessarily to do with
the Ojibwe, but the telling of it in Ojibwe was just very meaningful to
me. I don’t know how to explain it, but it was like the memory of both
that terror and that salvation was kept alive in equal measure, you
know, in Ojibwe in a way that was so beautifully drawn by Eugene, who’s
such an amazing, beautiful speaker of the language. It gave me a glimpse
of what life was like, how hard it was, but how close families were —
and still are, of course — too, it gave me a picture of the time that
I’ll never experience and a portrait of the kind of poverty, a kind of
vulnerability that goes with that kind of poverty, that also I’ve never
experienced. Ms. Tippett: This is taken from the recording David and Anton Treuer made of Eugene Stillday, telling his story. [soundbite: Eugene Stillday telling a story in Ojibwe] Ms. Tippett: You know, something I was thinking
about as I was reading you, and it’s occurring to me again as I’m
hearing you speak, another program we’re working on, looking into the
legacy of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. It’s very important to him, this
teaching from the Talmud, that words create worlds. I hear that in the
story you just told, and even as you’re telling it, you’re grasping for
the words to describe what it was. And yet, it comes through. It’s kind
of — it’s mysterious. Mr. Treuer: Right. The same idea that words give
life is also something you find in Ojibwe culture, in one part of the
creation story, you know, we were made out of fairly inert materials,
and we had no life until touched by sort of the breath of the Creator.
We were blown on and then came to life. And this link, of course,
between language and breath, speech and breath, is very much alive in
how the ceremonies, Ojibwe ceremonies, continue. Ojibwe ceremonies are based around sort of two things. Mostly either
legend-telling, for one thing, and storytelling, but a very particular
kind. And also song. And there’s very much a sense that this song being
sung as part of the ceremony is going right from both the vessel of the
drum being used into the singer, or through the singer, and then
directly into the body of the person receiving the song. And the words —
and, of course, the tune, one would hope — but the words are
communicating and giving that person life as we were given life
originally. [music: White Fish Bay Singers] I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being. Today with Ojibwe writer David Treuer. Ms. Tippett: You once wrote that, if your language was lost, if Ojibwe were lost, we will lose beauty. Mr. Treuer: Yeah. Ms. Tippett: What do you mean by that? What is in your mind when you say that, and in your heart? Mr. Treuer: Well, like that story I was talking
about that Eugene shared with us is one example of that. You know, maybe
I could draw on a different tradition, which would be a French literary
tradition to explain it better, but Marcel Proust said that,
particularly speaking of writing novels, said that nothing really exists
in and of itself in a book, that characters and situations and places
only take on life by way of contrast. That’s how novels build
themselves, are through creating contrasts and intentions, resolutions
and more contrasts and intentions. I think the same could be said for life, that nothing exists in and
of itself. Everything exists only by way of contrasts. So in and of
itself, I think Ojibwe is beautiful. Just the animal sound of the
language, how it flows, to the kinds of trickery that those words
themselves can rig up, like the example of the firefly I gave you. But
also in contrast to the English with which we are surrounded, Ojibwe
seems all the more precious, all the more beautiful. Ms. Tippett: I think you might look at the narrowing
down of the number of languages in the world as kind of a natural
process? It would be possible to say that that’s even progress, right?
That it comes with technology and with a more unified world. I could
imagine someone making that case and then asking, saying, you know, the
question would be that I think you were giving an answer to that
question of why, really, although it might be tragic to you, it might be
tragic to people you know, why should this ultimately matter to people
who don’t speak this language and know nothing of it and whose identity
is not formed by it? Mr. Treuer: Yeah. I think great advances in
communication, for instance, maybe brought the world closer together.
This might be a cynic’s point of view, but it brought us close enough to
really hurt each other in things like the First World War, Second World
War, and more recent endeavors. It hasn’t led to sort of, you know, a
great love-in and mutual understanding. Now there is, of course,
progress in some ways naturally, but if all languages were to die out
and be replaced with one — there were movements and sort of utopian
movements along these lines. Esperanto was one of them, right? Ms. Tippett: Yes, Esperanto. Mr. Treuer: The idea that if we all spoke the same
language, there’d be no misunderstanding. I don’t think that’s true. In
fact, I don’t think misunderstanding is the culprit here. I think the
culprit in terms of conflict, you know, deadly or otherwise, is the
sense that we should all be doing the same thing. I think that we’re
quite happily, busily doing different things and that’s in fact healthy. Ms. Tippett: So the culprit is an inability to live creatively with difference. Mr. Treuer: Perhaps so, yeah. Ms. Tippett: You know, you wrote an article in the LA Times,
and you tell a story in there. You described a moment of kind of
epiphany. You were spearing with friends on a lake in their treaty area.
I mean, I do, first of all, want you to talk about what it meant that
you were spearing, and how does that activity figure in? What in itself
does it mean? Mr. Treuer: Well, I was spending time with two
friends from Lac Courte Oreilles Reservation in north central Wisconsin.
On Lac Courte Oreilles and in that region, they’ve retained, they’ve
fought for in fact, starting in the ’70s and concluded recently — fought
for and retained their off-reservation treaty rights, many of them. One
of those treaty rights is the right to harvest fish, particularly
walleyed pike, using “primitive” methods; that is to say, spears and
nets and to do this before the state season opens — the state angling
season. Now all the spearing and netting is very tightly controlled by
the tribe and monitored, and people tend to guard this right and to use
it wisely. So although I’m Ojibwe and I’m from a different band from a different
region and my band did not sign that particular treaty, so I cannot
spear fish in that particular area. So, I was just hanging out.
Basically, I was drinking coffee, and they were spearing. And so for
them, it’s many things at once. They’re practicing a treaty right which
was denied them for many, many years. So it’s a political act to go out,
to go to the boat landings and offload their boats and to go spearing
on lakes ringed with the resort homes of wealthy Americans in northern
Wisconsin and to be heckled and shouted at and have things thrown off
docks at them. Ms. Tippett: That happens? Mr. Treuer: These things have happened. It happens.
It happens with some regularity. And people shouting things, my favorite
epithet shouted at Ojibwe people spear fishing in a treaty area,
“Indians, go home,” which I just think it’s so funny [laughs].
In any event — so it’s political. Spiritually, too, whenever an Ojibwe
person takes something — this is one of our few instructions — we don’t
really have commandments — is to, you know, always, at least in our
cosmology, honor the other beings. The fact of the matter is that those
fish were here a long time before we were, right? I mean, humans evolved many millions of years after these fish did.
So the fish are our elders in a sense and respect is owed them as elders
in a way. So you harvest the fish. You kill them with spears is
probably the best way to put them or you trap them in nets, which also
kills them. You fillet them and then the first bunch you eat for the
season, you’ll have a feast and a small ceremony, usually it’s just a
family thing, where you’ll give thanks to and for the fish. But it’s a
way of becoming closer to them. Ms. Tippett: It’s so interesting. I mean, it’s counterintuitive. Mr. Treuer: It is counterintuitive. So there’s a
sense that, you know, you can become closer, if you want to put it
another way, by killing. And there’s actually another Ojibwe idea about
that where when people have lost a loved one and they go into mourning,
they go into official mourning, it’s only a veteran who can bring them
out of their official mourning. Ms. Tippett: It’s only a what? A veteran? Mr. Treuer: A veteran, someone who’s been to war,
the idea being that, since they’ve taken life, the phrase that people
use in Ojibwe use is “to touch blood,” that only those who have touched
blood can wash away someone’s sorrow, because they’re so intimately
related to it, right? And with the fish, it’s a similar kind of
relationship. To really know them, you become related by the taking and the giving,
because then the fish is disbursed to people who don’t fish, and it’s
also a chance for one’s ancestors to come back and to eat the food that
they would have eaten in their lifetime, to feed them. So this is done
for fish, it’s done for the first batch of maple syrup, it’s done for
first kills in the fall, you know, in terms of animals that one might
shoot, deer, ducks, rabbits, things like that. It’s done particularly
for wild rice, which is our biggest food and probably our most important
food. Ms. Tippett: So the moment of epiphany, you’re drinking coffee while your friends were spearing. And what happened? Mr. Treuer: Well, we were in the boat, it’s dark,
it’s foggy, and we were just chatting and speaking Ojibwe and also
speaking English too, sort of diving back and forth between the two.
These are two guys who have been instrumental with a group of other
people in starting an immersion school on that reservation, which is an
Ojibwe-language immersion school which has had fantastic success. I
mean, these two guys and their families and the people they work with,
and there’s a big long list of them, have done amazing and important
work. So I admired them both a lot. They’re both really funny too, so
we’re having a good time. You do your spearing really close to shore in the shallow water, so
we’re maybe 15 or 20 feet from shore. Most of the houses are boarded up.
It’s April, and the vacationers haven’t come back to their cabins yet.
But a few of them are occupied year-round, and somebody must have had
their window open. I could see lights flickering in the house, that sort
of eerie blue glow of someone’s television. I could hear the program
they were watching. They were watching David Letterman and the Top Ten
List was on, the Top Ten countdown. It just seemed so out of place and
so impermanent and so weak, thin, and just passing — as passing as the
fog that night — that compared to how permanent the endeavor of spearing
with these guys felt, you know. This was something we’d been doing for
so long and still doing and still doing with and in the language and
still respecting the fish that we knew were supposed to be respected,
that felt permanent in comparison. That felt everlasting. I felt our
language can’t possibly die, not with people like this, not while doing
something like this in this place. We can’t possibly lose it. And I
don’t always feel that way, but I felt it then, and I feel that more
often than I feel scared that we’re going to lose it. [soundbite: singing in Ojibwe] David Treuer divides his time between the Leech Lake Reservation and
Los Angeles, where he teaches literature and creative writing at the
University of Southern California. His books include Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual, The Translation of Dr. Apelles, and most recently, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America From 1890 to the Present. His writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post. In closing, here is one of the friends with whom David Treuer was
speaking that day, Keller Paap, singing a song about snaring rabbits
with the students at his Ojibwe immersion school, which has been going
now since 2001. [soundbite: singing in Ojibwe] Staff: The On Being Project is Chris Heagle, Lily
Percy, Maia Tarrell, Marie Sambilay, Erinn Farrell, Laurén Dørdal, Tony
Liu, Erin Colasacco, Kristin Lin, Profit Idowu, Eddie Gonzalez, Lilian
Vo, Lucas Johnson, Damon Lee, Suzette Burley, Katie Gordon, Zack Rose,
Serri Graslie, Nicole Finn, and Colleen Scheck. Ms. Tippett: The On Being Project is located on
Dakota Land. Our lovely theme music is provided and composed by Zoë
Keating. And the last voice that you hear singing at the end of our show
is Cameron Kinghorn. On Being is an independent production of The On Being Project. It’s
distributed to public radio stations by PRX. I created this show at
American Public Media. Our funding partners include: The George Family Foundation, in support of the Civil Conversations Project. The Fetzer Institute, helping to build the spiritual foundation for a loving world. Find them at fetzer.org. Kalliopeia Foundation, working to create a future where universal
spiritual values form the foundation of how we care for our common home. Humanity United, advancing human dignity at home and around the
world. Find out more at humanityunited.org, part of the Omidyar Group. The Osprey Foundation — a catalyst for empowered, healthy, and fulfilled lives. And the Lilly Endowment, an Indianapolis-based, private family
foundation dedicated to its founders’ interests in religion, community
development, and education.
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