"Yellow finch" (American Goldfinch) is aginjibagwesi in the pre-colonial Bodwéwadmimwen (Potawatomi Language) of the land where I currently live.

The word literally translates to "the one who counts the leaves" (or "the leaf counter").

This colorful bird is seen by many Anishinaabeg (indigenous peoples including groups like the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi) as the spirit keeper of their shared languages. When you invite yellow finches into your garden via planting cone flowers or walk into the woods on Turtle Island, now you know part of their story. They are the birds counting the leaves in their song and keeping watch over the living languages of this land.

In the land of my own ancestors, the cousin of the Turtle Island Goldfinch (the so called “European Goldfinch”) is called lasair choille in the pre-colonial Gaeilge language(the Irish Gaelic language). This translates evocatively as "flame of the forest" or "forest flash," in reference to its vibrant colors.

The pictures show Yellow Finch enjoying Purple Cone Flower seeds in the winter. This is one of the reasons I leave the dead flower heads standing over winter and do not chop them down like most people (for the sake of cleancut cookie cutter yard superficial appearances). One of the Cone flowers many gifts is her nutrient dense and medicinal seeds which she gifts to the winged ones, so they can share their gift of song, their beautiful colors and the elegance of their movement with the world as their own medicinal gifts.

Ashosikwimia'kuk is the Bodwéwadmimwen (Potawatomi Language) word for Echinacea purpurea (Eastern purple coneflower).

(First two photos by Gerry Sibell)

This is the first of a series of posts I will be sharing on my blog and here which honor our winged kin and their relationships with specific plants, cultures and lands.

The English language is structured to re-enforce anthropocentric delusions of grandeur, relegating all our non-human relations on earth to the demeaning status of being an “it”. Older languages with an animistic ethos of deep belonging to place do not refer to the trees, or the birds, or the fish, or the river or the mountain as an “it”, they refer to those beings as kin. These languages (such as the Gaelic language of my ancestors and many languages of the pre-colonial peoples of Turtle Island (aka "north america") invite us into relational thinking (rather than reductionistic, anthropocentric and materialistic) when we perceive the more than human world. These are languages that tell stories about the gifts that unique beings offer this world, the character of their spirit and their reciprocal relationship to place and human communities.

These variations in language in how we refer to the beings we share this world with may seem inconsequential to the indoctrinated self-important statist that trusts “The Science”, but ask yourself this, how much easier is it to train human beings to be willing to destroy habitat for birds, poison a river, or carve into a mountain for lithium or oil or clear cut an ancient forest for profit when you raise them describing those beings as inanimate objects, rather than referring to them in the same way you would refer to a sister or a grandfather?

Thus, I invite you to learn to speak the names of your non-human kin with words that were also spoken by your ancient ancestors. Within these threads of your ancestral past and the living memory of place based cultures where you now live, you can awaken dormant seeds of knowing that weave through your bones, into your heart and through the fabric of your soul.

Hiraeth is a Welsh term that does not translate to English. It conveys a blend of homesickness, nostalgia and longing for a place that one has never been before in this particular lifetime. “Hiraeth” is a pull on the heart that conveys a distinct feeling of missing something irretrievably lost in the physical world.

Hiraeth also gives a name to that sense of incompleteness you feel when you’re acutely aware of something missing in your life. Something you’ve left behind in the deep past – a home, a sense of feeling at home in yourself, an out-grown dream – or maybe an ideal you’ve invented that can never be realised, or a hope that perpetually eludes you as the future unfolds. At its core, hiraeth boils down to an awareness of the presence of absence, kindling a feeling in which pain and joy are braided too tightly to untangle.

I believe that through learning and speaking the the pre-colonial words that refer to our more than human kin, interacting with those beings with respect and reciprocity (providing habitat for them and expressing gratitude for their gifts) we can heal that hole in our heart that Hiraeth refers to and find a new kind of wholeness as we indigenize to the place where we live.

Words and language are indeed powerful sociocultural technologies that alter our psychology either for the better or for the worse, and from the little bit I have learned of indigenous languages from Turtle Island (and now also having begun to learn some Gaelic and Welsh words) I can say that there is a significant difference in the type impact those linguistic technologies have on human hearts and minds as compared to English.

Perhaps, as Robin Wall Kimmerer has suggested, writers, poets and everyday nature lovers might breathe new life back into the heavily colonized and anthropocentric English language through inventing new reverent and animistic ways to wield English words. I have strove to do that in my own published works, but I also feel moved to honor the older, more reverent languages that already embody ecological literacy and the intact place based culture embodiment that arises from an animistic worldview.