*3.2. Stretching Practical Wisdom*

To live toward a new future, we need to do more than analyze challenges; we need to stretch the largely white Western inheritance of practical wisdom. The previous section offered an arc of ecological concerns from the 1940s to the present, drawing largely on North American ecological leaders, mostly white. By itself, this approach is flawed. Gilio-Whitaker (2019) critiques the crediting of Rachel Carson's *Silent Spring* in 1962 and the first Earth Day in 1970 as the origins of a modern ecological movement, offering a more complex perspective. She especially decries the nineteenth century naturalists, such as John Muir, whose environmental perspectives were grounded in human superiority and colonial views of indigenous people. As much as they contributed, these hierarchy-oriented naturalists left a heritage that continues today in colonial approaches to the earth and to indigenous people. She encourages people to seek a fuller history (pp. 106–110). Thus, I turn primarily to North American indigenous authors in this section as they point to wider wisdom of the earth. In so doing, I acknowledge that other voices also need to be discussed in another work, voices from Africa, Latin America, Asia, Europe, and the Pacific. This too is urgent, as argued by Vanessa Nakate, a young Ugandan activist who decries the dismissal of African voices and points toward a "bigger picture" (Nakate 2021).

Dina Gilio-Whitaker lays much of the ecological crisis at the foot of colonial modes of theorizing and structuring the world, documenting case after case in which the domination of indigenous people and the destruction of ecosystems went hand in hand. She offers a sharp critique, supported by details of cases, laws, history, and activist efforts. She also describes traditions that undergird much indigenous life, including "a philosophical paradigm very different from that of dominant Western society," a paradigm that is often ignored in legal decisions and practices of appropriation (p. 157). She elaborates on the connections that indigenous people have with their homelands—the lack of "separation between people and land, between people and other life forms, or between people and their ancient ancestors whose bones are infused in the land they inhabit" (p. 157.). Others have also accented the profound connections indigenous people have with place and land, such as Vine Deloria, Jr., and George Tinker.

How can people in non-indigenous cultures value and learn from indigenous peoples without abusing and distorting their sacred traditions? The challenges of those traditions to most Western worldviews are so vital that we need to find ways to learn without objectifying and to collaborate without dominating or colonizing. Fortunately, some authors point the way, even as they warn about the dangers noted above. Sherri Mitchell, of the Penobscot people of Maine and the Maritimes, is an advocate of people's learning from one another and seeking harmony, even as she narrates massacres, Indian school tragedies, displacements, destruction of land, and the trauma of her people. She recognizes that the United States "was founded on genocide and slavery" (Mitchell 2018, p. 69), ye<sup>t</sup> she appeals to the potential for healing. Her starting point is to recognize that humanity is at "a teetering point of choice that will determine the future of all life" (p. 22). Mitchell's vision is to weave Penobscot teachings with other views to harmonize and align "with common purpose," a vision of oneness without sameness (p. 23). To that end, she shares the sacred teachings of her people and invites readers to listen to and respect all living things (p. 28). Writing with a sense of urgency, she recognizes that the human family is on "the precipice of an evolutionary leap, one that requires us to transcend our differences and integrate into a more harmonized way of being" (p. 40).

Mitchell's gift is sharing the history and teachings of her people, paired with a vision of a world that can be. Her approach suggests how people might learn from one another and from all living things as they join in stretching practical wisdom. Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013) builds in a similar direction in *Braiding Sweetgrass*. She describes the worldviews of her Potawatomi people, a Native nation originating between Lake Michigan and Lake Huron (later dispersed) and akin to other tribes and first nations of the Great Lakes region in worldview, language, and life practices. Kimmerer herself lives and teaches in upstate New York, where she explores and lives with forests and family. In her writing, she narrates the life of plants and her life among them, drawing from her knowledge as an environmental and forest biologist and the lifeways and traditions of her people. Like Mitchell, she understands her writing as an offering and an invitation for others to learn from the wisdom of her people and the life of plants.

Kimmerer highlights details that I identify as practical wisdom. She describes the wisdom of pecan trees that have airborne communication systems (via pheromones) to warn other trees against pests and connections, which in turn produce defensive chemicals. Pecan trees are also connected underground via fungi and fungal strands that, based on current evidence, gather the excess carbohydrates from some trees to share with others, thus spreading the bounty and enabling the whole pecan grove to bear pecans at the same time, rather than creating a divide between bearing and non-bearing trees. She sees the communication systems as the ways that trees talk with one another as her ancestors taught her to believe (pp. 11–21, esp. 19–21).

Kimmerer also describes the gifts of wild strawberries and black ash, living interdependently with the Potawatomi people, who gratefully receive nourishment from the strawberries and basket makings from the black ash, while other animals also receive from them and while people care for the plants and trees by careful selection and pruning (pp. 22–32, 141–55). Kimmerer further describes what she learns from maple trees and grasses and how they live mutually with other life forms in their habitats (pp. 63–71, 156–166). For the Potawatomi, primal values are grounded in gratitude and the aliveness of creation, which inspire practices of mutuality and reciprocity for the sake of the living whole.

Kimmerer further stretches practical wisdom as she describes the living nature of her native language, learned as an adult. Baffled by the complexity of words and grammatical structures, she experienced an epiphany when her sister sent her a box of word tiles and an Ojibwe dictionary, given the close relationship between her language and that of Ojibwe people. Kimmerer was ready to quit when she discovered an unusual word, "to be a Saturday" (p. 66). How could a noun be expressed in verb form? She reacted: "I grabbed the dictionary and flipped more pages and all kinds of things seemed to be verbs: 'to be a hill,' 'to be red,' 'to be a long sandy stretch of beach,' and then my finger rested on *wiikwegamaa*: 'to be a bay,' 'Ridiculous!'" Then, in a sudden moment of realization, she could smell and see and hear the bay. The moment was an epiphany: "A bay is a noun only if water is *dead*. 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" (p. 66.). The practical wisdom conveyed in these language forms communicates that everything is alive. Kimmerer calls this "the language of animacy," and the animacy extends to rocks and mountains, fire and places, and medicines and songs (p. 67). I have shared Kimmerer's discovery to reveal the nature of practical wisdom, embodied in language and in the relationships of pecans, strawberries, maple trees, and black ash with their habitats and the plants, people, and other animals that dwell therein.

Kimmerer's discoveries are not unique to her or her people. The Hopi language, while different from the Potawatomi, is also marked by relationships and movement, as discovered long ago by linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf (1956). He noted that the Hopi word to describe a wave in the ocean is not an isolated "wave"; rather, it appears in multiple verb forms that indicate a range of movement, such as sloshing, "kicking up a sea," or undulating. The words describe movements of the water in relationship with the sea, rather than isolating the wave from the movement in which it flows (pp. 52–53). Whorf explains that the Hopi preference for verbs contrasts with the English preference for nouns; thus, the Hopi language "perpetually turns our propositions about *things* into propositions about *events*" (p. 63). Space and time are merged, as are subjects and predicates.

Whorf's analysis of the complex Hopi language is more nuanced than my summary, but one can see the movement nature of the language, which echoes Kimmerer's description of movement in Potawatomi and Ojibwe languages. Whorf also observes connections between language and worldviews; "Most metaphysical words in Hopi are verbs, not

nouns as in European languages" (p. 61). Language has the power to shape and be shaped by worldviews; thus, people do not experience time and matter in the same ways because their experiences are mediated through diverse languages (p. 158). Language affects what people experience, and their experiences help shape language.

I have shared in some detail the teachings of indigenous peoples, pecan trees and wild strawberries, and diverse languages, all stretching the limits of practical wisdom in North America. If we are to respond well to a weeping planet, we need to face the limitations of the assumed wisdom that modern/postmodern people have inherited within a techno-industrialized, progress-seeking, individual-focused, capital-oriented society. We need to stretch practical wisdom in order to learn from many ancestors (including our own), many living beings, many language worlds, and the spiritual experiences and instructions of peoples living closely with the earth.
