In Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer describes her Native American language Potawatomi as having a “grammar of animacy”. In Potawatomi 70% of words are verbs while in English only 30% are. English is loaded with nouns— things, objects. Wall Kimmerer writes: “When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikwegamaa—to be a bay—releases the water from bondage and lets it live… it could do otherwise—become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall…” (p.55)
We see to decay as an ending, a slow shift of the object through decrepitude into non-existence. Yet if we glimpse the world through Potawatomi grammatical animacy we intuit the energy of life, of being, through all that is living. Decay is only transition into other states of existence, in an ongoing process of metamorphosis.
