Language can be dehumanizing towards other people, sure. That almost seems obvious. But the language we use can also devalue and denigrate the air we breath, the ground we walk on, the birds that wake us in the morning.

The very word culture meant ‘place tilled’ in Middle English, and the same word goes back to Latin colere, ‘to inhabit, care for, till, worship’...To be cultural, to have a culture, is to inhabit a place sufficiently intensely to cultivate it—to be responsible for it, to respond to it, to attend to it caringly

Calling a person “an illegal,” and flattening their entire existence into a crime is dehumanizing. But it doesn’t stop at a social slight, language like that is propaganda that drives public opinion to the point where they think it’s justified for their neighbors to be disappeared off the street by ICE.

the state has the power of violence, but language has the power to normalize it. And we need to be very conscious of that power.

Of course forces of colonization want me to think my time is something to sell . But I think when we can start to see these languages that have been systematically killed off as doors to a different way of seeing the world (versus just a group of vocabulary words), we can start to understand why they might want to silence a differing perspective.

I believe Indigenous languages hold deep wisdom that can liberate us from constraints on our personhood. But beyond our individual selves, they can also show us how to be in deeper community with each other. And by each other, I don’t just mean other human beings. I mean beings that the English language don’t even recognize as “beings” at all.