And it’s worth noting that “those who take care of us” traditionally included the rooted beings modern western civilization has labelled as “weeds”. Intact place based animistic (indigenous) cultures had no such designation for our rooted kin in their languages, they had no word for “weeds”.

The fact that the English language invented a designation for some plants that is essentially intended to deem them the “Untermensch” of the realm of photosynthetic beings speaks to the imperialistic, anthropocentric, homogenizing, dominating, materialistic and culturally adolescent tendencies of the statist regimes that pushed the English language forward into the world.

When you look deeper and find that 114 plant names in the English language containing the word “weed” in the common name (with many of those plants being important food and medicine crops for indigenous pre-colonial cultures, and/or providing for pollinators, protecting soil and cleaning water) a picture begins to emerge that illuminates how some aspects of the english language are strong indicators of a culturally adolescent (ecologically illiterate, superficial, exploitative and anthropocentric) civilization.

One example is a plant commonly known as Cattail in English. That plant is seen as a “weed” by the control freak conventional ornomental pond maintenance people of modern western civilization. Those “professionals” suggest spraying that native plant with systemic herbicides (like roundup) to maintain the sterile lifeless ornamental ponds they install. So they poison the water beings the water itself, and go to war with a food and medicine plant needlessly, why? Because their obsession with uniformity, domination, sterility and their ecological illiteracy is an expression of their cultural adolescence and their spiritual impoverishment, that is why.

In Potawatomi, the word for cattail, bewiieskwinuk, translates to “we wrap the baby in it” and in the Mohawk language, cattail (Osháhrhe) translates to “the cattail wraps humans in her gifts” as if we were her babies.

Robin Wall Kimmerer comments on this in her book Braiding Sweetgrass by saying

“In that one word, we are carried in the cradleboard of Mother Earth.”

What a beautiful and apt description of this plant, Cattails do indeed offer to lovingly envelop humanity with her many gifts, providing both our ancestors and us with loving support and nourishment to be able to survive and thrive in challenging situations. The academics and Big Ag “professionals” of modern industrial civilization look upon this plant with distain, and yet cultures that are more mature, ecologically literate and spiritually wealthy instead recognize her many gifts.

The indigenous peoples of turtle island had many uses for this plant. They harvested food from the roots, vegetable from the stalk, pollen for flour, edible flower stalks, seeds for tinder or diapers, leaves for cordage and mats and baskets, torches from seed heads, aloe-like medicine from the goo which looks slimy but feels great on bug bites...and more.

Modern academics say “if left unchecked, cattails can clog waterways, harm agriculture and fisheries, and host other species, such as blackbirds, which can cause further crop damage. Fast growing, tall standing, and rapidly spreading via both seeds and specialized root systems, cattails have perfected numerous adaptations to invade, occupy, and thrive in wetland ecosystems, with consequences for the agricultural industry”

And yet, “this is all good for the plant, of course—and it’s good for people,” insists Kimmerer, a State University of New York Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology and an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.

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For more information on linguistic artifacts as indicators of cultural maturity, read my essay linked below:

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