A couple of weeks into summer I woke up with the morning light. My dog was waiting expectantly by the door and so I threw on my sandals, put on his leash, and stepped into the steamy July morning. The sun was already strong, radiating over the grass as we walked across the lawn.
We were out there only a minute or so when I felt a sharp pain on the inside of my ankle. At first I thought I must have brushed by a thistle or some other prickly plant, but when I looked down I saw a flurry of wings, familiar black and yellow stripes.
Yes, I had been stung. I must have gotten too close to flower or nest. And now the wasp was hovering over my bare skin, getting ready for the next strike, the burning from the first one already starting to spread outwards. With a panicked gasp, I reached down and tried to gently brush at the wasp with the back of my hand, my care and restraint born more of a desire not to get stung again than anything else. After a couple of hand waves, the wasp flew off.
Back inside, I hobbled over to the couch to google “wasp sting remedies”, and sat down with an unimpressed flop – right next to the book I had been reading.
The book is called Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, written by botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer. Recommended to our ESL team last year, it is in the author’s words, “a braid of stories … woven from three strands: Indigenous ways of knowing, scientific knowledge, and the story of an Anishinabekwe scientist … old stories and new ones that can be medicine for our broken relationship with the Earth … in which people and the land are good medicine for each other,” (Wall Kimmerer, preface, x).
The stories within this book’s pages, though different, are nonetheless intertwined and connected to the point it is almost impossible to discuss one without reference to another. The following is just one of many that shifted my thinking. In it, Wall Kimmerer speaks about the “grammar of animacy”, and the ways in which we use language to describe the living world in hierarchical terms:
“In English, you are either a human or a thing. Our grammar boxes us in by the choice of reducing a non-human being to it … Where are words for the simple existence of another living being? My friend Michael Nelson, an ethicist who thinks a great deal about moral inclusion, told me about a woman he knows, a field biologist whose work is among other-than-humans. Most of her companions are not two-legged, and so her language has shifted to accommodate her relationships. She kneels along the trail to inspect a set of moose tracks, saying, ‘Someone’s already been this way this morning.’ ‘Someone’s in my hat,’ she says, shaking out a deer fly. Someone, not something,” (Wall Kimmerer, p 56).
Language is not neutral. It reflects the core beliefs and assumptions of the society that speaks it, reinforcing them at every utterance. Language has power. And in our classrooms, some of the lessons we teach may be unintentional, conveyed only through the words we choose.
All my life I have referred to wasps (and a significant number of other animals and plants for that matter) as “it”. And that language, inherently distancing, probably did not help me to see my interconnectedness with the world I was describing.
Our science curriculum is full of sustainability and environmental impact expectations. And we hope that by teaching students about these critical issues, we empower and inspire them to care for the world (an all-too-relevant need, as the string of environmental catastrophes this summer alone has shown us). But – even unintentionally – does the language we use to teach, to describe the living world, run antithetical to these lofty curricular goals? Are we trying to swim one way, with the current of our words pulling us in another? Can someone truly care about and for trees, waterways, and pollinating insects when we ascribe language that reduces them to an “it”? It is a question worth exploring, and Wall Kimmerer offers some observations:
“Our toddlers speak of plants and animals as if they were people, extending to them self and intention and compassion – until we teach them not to. We quickly retrain them and make them forget. When we tell them the tree is not a who, but an it, we make that maple an object; we put a barrier between us, absolving ourselves of moral responsibility and opening the door to exploitation. Saying it makes a living land into ‘natural resources’. If a maple is an it we can take up the chainsaw. If a maple is a her, we think twice,” (Wall Kimmerer p 57).
I sat on the couch a while longer and reflected that while being stung remains a very unpleasant way of waking up in the morning, wasps do have an important place in our world. They consume insects and control populations that would otherwise ravage vegetable gardens. And even though they are not as efficient as bees, they do have the ability to pollinate flowers, adding to our source of fruit. And that seems like a pretty good thing for everyone.
So, perhaps language can shift thinking. Perhaps it might move me from indifference at batting away a wasp, to seeing connection, and being more careful the next time I walk across our shared home.
There are countless applications to teaching and learning (and unlearning) in the pages of this wise and beautiful book. If you have the chance to read it, I wish you joyful discoveries. But for now, I think I’ll go have a salad for lunch. I have some fresh cucumbers someone helped make for me.
