Stick with me here. We WILL get to Jimmy Kimmel.
…
This section is from a post I wrote in 2021:
I read Braiding Sweetgrass/ Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Kimmerer has a PhD in botany and has studied plants all her life. She is also an enrolled member of the Anishinaabe nation; she belongs to Potawatomi people.
FYI: Anishinaabe (uh-nish-uh-nah-bee) is umbrella name for the large and culturally interconnected nations that covered the massive woodlands that once covered most of Canada and the US from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic. Within that overarching interconnection were smaller (though still very sizeable) nations such as Ojibwe, Odawa, Saulteaux, Potawatomi, Oji-Cree, and Algonquin peoples.
The essay that astonished me most was “Learning the Grammar of Animacy.” She describes the revelation it was to try to learn the native Ojibwe language her grandfather spoke before government boarding schools stripped native kids of their native language. Kimmerer has spent years trying to learn her own language.
We know ourselves via the language that we speak. English is mostly nouns, with about 30% verbs. Ojibwe is 70% verbs. Much of English is about delineating gender. Anishinaabe doesn’t divide the world into sex.
Anishinaabe DOES describe the world according to the nature and properties of how things are changing, moving, growing, or interconnecting to something else. The example she uses is that a bay of water is not a bay. The Ojibwe word for bay is translated to a VERB meaning “to be a bay.” As if it might be something else tomorrow which, since a bay changes with weather and seasons, it might be. The bay is not the static noun where three sides of land are filled with water. It’s the moving interconnection of trees, water entering from streams and springs, water moving outward to the lake or river, the interconnected life that happens in and around a bay. A bay is animate, it’s alive. It’s a place where change happens within boundaries that also change.
What she learns is that her native language not about what things are now but about how things are connected. One does not own things. One is in a relationship for a day or a lifetime and the language speaks to that.
Her scientific PhD is important to her and she values it. She explains that much of western science is about breaking entities down to see and understand the parts. Indigenous language is about seeing the connections. Both are needed to build a path for all of earth.
…
We know ourselves via the language that we speak.
So I’ve been thinking about language. How does our way of using language expand - or explain - or oversimplify the world around us?
Then I woke this morning remembering a woman I met in my Employability Skills Program in the jail.
I worked with men far more than with women. Women are incarcerated for failure to pay child support WAY less than men because most judges go out of their way to help a woman stay with her kids. But sometimes it happened and I always went to talk with these women to see what their story was and if I could work with them.
Let’s call her Happy - as in one of Snow White’s seven dwarves. This is not meant to disrespect her but to tell you how unusual I found her to be. Happy was in her 20’s and was very short, maybe five feet tall. She was heavy with a face as round as the moon, beautiful brown eyes, and her braids wrapped her head in an old-fashioned coronet. Weirdly, there seemed to be no anger or resentment in her. She may have been the only inmate I ever met who appeared totally accepting of her situation.
I asked questions. She said her kids were all in foster care because she didn’t take care of them right. She was not even 30 and she had FIVE kids, none of them babies or toddlers? “Oh I had my first baby when I was eleven. I was living in Chicago in the projects and a guy we knew had at me.”
Did she have an intellectual disability? I think so, although I knew her so briefly that it would be presumptuous to say I actually knew that. She was just so sweet, there’s no other adequate word for her personality. She thanked me for finding her. Oh yes, she would love to be in a program that would help her get a job. Had she had jobs before? Oh yes. No, she didn’t go to high school. She stayed home with her mother and siblings, and her own babies and then, when she could, she had jobs, mostly in warehouses.
I made a resume for her. We talked about job applications which were beyond daunting for her since she could barely write or read. Yet on her first day of job search she came back within an hour with a job! She’d walked to the employment agency where she’d once gotten a job. One of their staff called to give me the details and then said, “She’s the best. She always comes to work on time, she works really hard, she’s a jewel of an employee.”
I knew this employment agent; she and I had gone to lunch a few times and we had similar observations about poor people and poor jobs.
“Then why doesn’t she have a steady job?”
“She gets stuck in the lowest paying jobs which are the least stable ones, so when the work goes away she’s laid off and she doesn’t know how to get the next job. I hope that now she knows to come back to us. Your program giving her a resume is huge for her. She didn’t have a way to get one and no one hires without one.”
“Isn’t it exploitive to use her like this?”
“You betcha. But the employer is making money on here, my employment agency takes a big cut of her paycheck, so no one in power is going to change.”
We know ourselves via the language that we speak.
In plain English, Happy had five kids that she did such a lousy job of parenting the state took them away. In plain English the story is a deadbeat parent plus exploited taxpayers who are now paying thousands of dollars per month, to foster parents, to raise her children.
If we stick to nouns and condemning adjectives, this is not a complicated situation.
If we ask questions … this story is interconnecting tragedies. Raised in Cabrini Green, an infamously dangerous housing project. Raped at 11 and probably more than then. Never professionally diagnosed for whatever cognitive issues she had. Punished when she did things wrong. Never taught to read or write. A convergence of poverty, violence, disregard, and yet, look at her. Look at her sweet face, her kindness, her longing to do things right. Look at how hard she will work if given a place to work.
I would like to know, what happened to give her such sweet generosity? We want to know how all this happened. We want to know how she survived it. She breaks our hearts and no, I don’t know what happened to her.
…
So Jimmy Kimmel was kicked from ABC for a political monologue that poked at Trump’s sanctimonious grief about Kirk. You probably saw this, too. When a reporter asked how he was coping with the loss of his friend, Trump bragged about his ballroom. https://www.newsweek.com/what-did-jimmy-kimmel-say-about-charlie-kirk-tv-monologue-full-2131760
We are stuck in a skewed and terrible national moment about who gets to use language to ask questions - and who better shut up and fawn. Nothing, right now, seems to elicit more threat than to ask questions and seek the inconvenient connections.
So I guess that’s my take away here.
Ask questions. Look for connections. Just because someone in power says it, doesn’t mean it’s true.
Now more than ever, we need our comedians, storytellers, scientists, historians, and each and every soul who will sit for fifteen minutes wondering what to write on their protest sign this week. Each and every person who will call or write elected folks about what’s on their minds and in their worries. Because using language to ask questions has always been humanity’s most powerful weapon, our strongest defense, and our clearest path.
We know ourselves via the language that we speak.
Add new comment