Clara and her "ideal car," fall 1997
Reflections
from the Ahnishinahbæótjibway (We, the People)
|
November 17, 1997
Dear Noam
Chomsky,
Thank you very much for your letter
of condolence about my husband Wub-e-ke-niew.
Your letter is one that would have meant a great deal to him, as
it does
to me. (Ahnishinahbæótjibway people communicate with their deceased relatives, so perhaps
“means”
is the more appropriate verb.)
Wub-e-ke-niew credited you with
giving him the insight which enabled him to understand the English
language
beyond its surface. One of the agreements
which we made at the outset of our relationship, was that he would
teach me as
much as he could of what he knew, if I would in turn teach him as much
as I
could of what I knew, especially the English language.
After we had been together only a few years,
he would ask me repeatedly what was the “key” to the English language,
which
was a question I did not know how to answer.
He would say, “Why won’t you tell me?
It’s your native language—you should know what it is.” At that time, I did not have the insight
into an Ahnishinahbæótjibway perspective, from which might have answered
his question. Among Wub-e-ke-niew’s
many gifts to me were such questions about my “native” language and
culture,
pushing me to consider things which I had taken for granted, to try to
explain
them in the context of a very different world-view.
Wub-e-ke-niew read some of your
books, and after having read an article of yours in The Progressive,
wrote to you, although without really expecting a reply.
He was delighted when you answered,
defending Lorraine Kingsley’s paper on “discipline.”
We subsequently gave your letter to Lorraine, who also very much
appreciated it. From his reading of
your work, and his correspondence with you, he gained what was a deeply
meaningful insight from his perspective: that the “key” to the English
language
was that it is “abstract, linear and hierarchical.”
He would tell people with pride, “Noam Chomsky showed me the
English language.”
Wub-e-ke-niew thought about issues
of language until the very end of his life.
As he understood the English language more clearly, he became
increasingly convinced that “language creates the world,” and that
transformation of English, particularly to include what he understood
as an
“indigenous female perspective,” had the potential of radically
transforming
the world.
Throughout this past summer, I
worked with Wub-e-ke-niew intensively, trying to understand the meaning
behind
what he was saying about “language.”
One of my academic advisors, Robert “Robin” Brown, is a linguist
(among
other things). During my brief sojourns
to the University, Robin Brown and I also discussed what both
Wub-e-ke-niew and
you were saying about language; Wub-e-ke-niew and I would talk at
length about
what you and Robin Brown were saying.
The topic merits a longer discussion
that what I can give you right now, but it seems as though part of the
crucial
distinction between Ahnishinahbæótjibway and English
has to do with underlying organization: that the core referents of Ahnishinahbæótjibway are patterns of interrelationship, while in English they are
abstract
ideals. There is more to it than that,
and another part of it has to do with interrelationships with the
natural
world. After nearly a full day of
wrestling with questions this past summer, Wub-e-ke-niew finally told
me, “All
you have to do is look at the ecosystem.
Ahnishinahbæótjibway maintained a paradise. Now look
at it. The water is all polluted,
everything has been wrecked and
plundered. There’s your
answer.” He returned to this idea, of
the environment as a manifestation of language, several times
throughout the
summer.
Another aspect of it became apparent
only toward the end of the summer.
Wub-e-ke-niew had given me a car this spring [to be strictly
factual, he
repaired a car which I’d bought from a friend last winter for $35
(neighborhood
entrepreneurs pay people $25 to tow them away before the City does),
turning it
into something very close to my “ideal” car].
He steadfastly maintained it was “your car, so you drive.” During the
years of our marriage, I had
always let him drive when we traveled together, in part because he had
been an
extremely competent professional truck driver and was a fairly critical
backseat driver. During the summer, I
struggled to make sense of his often urgently-delivered advice on how
to drive,
and finally, I asked him what he was seeing, that I didn’t. He told me that I wasn’t paying attention to
“the energy,” which he then extended into lessons on how to see around
corners
and predict other drivers’ actions.
What he said fit with what he had showed me, years previously,
about
hunting; as well as with the context of other aspects of Ahnishinahbæótjibway culture and ways of being. ...
I’m not certain what else to write
about this right now. I am amply aware
that much of what I might say is not only quite strictly beyond the
parameters
of Western academic discourse, but that there are dogmatic defenses in
Western
epistemology to keep it outside of those parameters.
However, it is quite clear to me that there are integrated
elements of Ahnishinahbæótjibway awareness
and culturally legitimated communication which include these
domains—and
Wub-e-ke-niew was always right about whether or not there was a car
around the
curve, on the lightly trafficked rural roads we drove this summer. “Keeping people in a box” which cuts them
off from these kinds of awareness and communication is something which
fits
quite nicely with other patterns of Western societal hierarchy; using
old
anthropological terms, it’s functional within the system.
And, there are people in what Wub-e-ke-niew
called “White society” who do communicate in these domains, although
perhaps in
ways which are only vaguely recognized as “intuition.”
…
Wub-e-ke-niew very clearly saw his approaching death. During the last few days of his life, he
asked me to do a number of things, “because I can’t.”
Among the four key issues, which he returned to several times
during his last days, was his request, “Be sure to tell Noam Chomsky
that it’s
in the language, not in the institutions.
The language creates the institutions.” [Wub-e-ke-niew
and I]
talked at some length about that letter [that you wrote me last Spring]. Wub-e-ke-niew then gave me several examples
of “institutions” excluding people, including observations about the
buildings
at the University of Minnesota. He
explained that, “those buildings are designed through language,” and
noted that
their imposing architecture made them inaccessible to people in
wheelchairs; he
also commented that access to them is limited fairly exclusively to
people of
certain social classes.
Wub-e-ke-niew and I had discussed
your fairly tightly delineated definitions of “language,” both in the
context
of your letter and with regard to the terminology I might use in my
Ph.D.
thesis. I had conveyed to
Wub-e-ke-niew, Robin Brown’s explanations of the political and
historical
factors which, according to Brown, may have played a role in your
definitions,
focus and research emphasis.
Wub-e-ke-niew and I talked at length about “discourse” versus
“language”—and Wub-e-ke-niew insisted that what he meant was language.
If one begins at the reality-base of
the Ahnishinahbæótjibway instead of the philosophical base of the Western
Europeans, then what Wub-e-ke-niew was saying begins to make sense, at
least to
me, although I haven’t figured out how to describe it clearly, yet. …
This is getting to be a long letter;
the main point of it is Wub’s message to you, that “it’s in the
language.”
…
Your correspondence with
Wub-e-ke-niew, the work of yours which he read, your ideas, and your
endorsement of his book, meant a great deal to him.
He was passionately interested in language: both in thoroughly
understanding and being able to use the English language, and,
especially
during the last few years of his life, in understanding “language” in a
broader
sense. He deeply believed that language
as he saw it, was a key to healing the pathologies which he saw in
Western
society. “Thank you” is an inadequate
acknowledgement, but I don’t know what other words one might write.
Sincerely,
Clara and her "ideal
car," fall 1997
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