One Native Life (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

One Native Life

© Indian Country Today July 11, 2007. All Rights Reserved
Posted: July 11, 2007
by: Richard Wagamese
http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096415347

Learning Ojibway

I was 24 when the first Ojibway word rolled off my tongue. It felt all round
and rolling, not like the spikey sound of English with all those hard-edged
consonants. When I said it aloud, I felt like I'd really, truly spoken for
the first time in my life.

I was a toddler when I was removed from my family and if I spoke Ojibway at
all then, it was baby talk and the language never had a chance to sit in me
and grow. English became my prime language and even though I developed an
ease and facility with it, there was always something lacking. It never
really quite felt real, valid even. It was like a hazy memory that never
quite reaches clarity and leaves you puzzled whenever it arises. When that
first Ojibway word floated out from between my teeth, I understood.

You see, that first word opened the door to my culture. When I spoke it, I
stepped over the threshold into an entirely new way of understanding myself
and my place in the world. Until then I had been almost like a guest in my
own life, standing around waiting for someone or something to explain
things for me. That one word made me an inhabitant.

It was peendigaen. Come in. Peendigaen, spoken with an outstretched hand and
a rolling of the wrist. Beckoning. Come in. Welcome. This is where you
belong. I had never encountered an English word that had that resonance -
one that could change things so completely.

It was awkward at first. There's a softness to the language that's
off-putting when you first begin to speak it. It's almost as if
timelessness had a vocabulary. With each enunciation the word gained
strength, clarity and I got the feeling that I was speaking a language that
had existed for longer than any the world has known. This one had never been
adapted to become other languages like English had evolved from Germanic
tongues.

Instead, the feeling of Ojibway in my throat was permanence. I stood on
ground I had never encountered before, an unknown territory whose sweep was
compelling and uplifting and full. Peendigaen. Come in. And I walked fully
into the world of my people for the first time.

After that, I learned more words. Then I struggled to put whole sentences
together. I made a lot of mistakes. I was used to the English process of
talk and I created sentences that were mispronounced and wrong. People
laughed when they heard me and I understood what cultural embarrassment
could feel like. It made me feel like quitting, like English could spare me
the laughter of my people.

Then I heard a wise woman talk at a conference. She spoke of being removed
from her culture, unplugged from it, disconnected and set aside like an old
toaster. But she was always a toaster and the day came when someone plugged
her back in and the electricity flowed. She became functional again - and
the tool of her reawakening was her language.

She spoke of the struggle to relearn her talk. She spoke of the same
embarrassment I felt and the feeling of being an oddity amongst her own.
She spoke of the difficulty in getting past the cultural shame and reaching
out for her talk with every fiber of her being. And she spoke of the warm
wash of the language on the hurts she'd carried all her life, how the soft
roll of the talk was like a balm for her spirit. Then she spoke of prayer.

Praying in her language was like having the ear of Creator for the first
time. She felt heard and blessed and healed. It wasn't much, she said. Just
a few words of gratitude, like prayers should be; but the words went outward
from her and became a part of the whole, a portion of the great sacred
breath of Creation again. She understood then, she said, that our talk is
sacred and to speak it is the way we reconnect to our sacredness.

We owe it to others to pass it on. That was the other thing she said. If we
have even one word of our talk, if that's all we know, then we have a
responsibility to pass it on to our children and those who have had it
removed from them. You learn to speak for them. You learn to speak to
function as a tool for someone else's reconnection. I have never forgotten
that.

These days I'm far from fluent and I still spend far more time using
English, but the Ojibway talk sits there in the middle of my chest like a
hope and when I use it, in a prayer, in a greeting, in a talk somewhere, I
felt the same sensation as I did with that first word at 24 - the feeling
of being ushered in, of welcome, of familiarity and belonging.

An English word I admire is reclaim. It means to bring back, to return to a
proper course. When I learned to speak Ojibway, I reclaimed a huge part of
myself. It wasn't lost, I always owned it; it was just adrift on the great
sea of influence that is the modern world. And like a mariner lost upon
foreign seas, I sought a friendly shore to step out upon and learn to walk
again. My language became that shore.

I have an Ojibway name now. I introduce myself with it according to our
traditional protocols when I speak somewhere. I can ask important questions
in my language. I can greet people in the proper manner and I can pray.

For me, peendigaen, come in, meant I could express myself as who I was
created to be, and that's what this journey is all about - to learn to
express yourself as who you were created to be. You don't need to be a
Native person to understand that, just human.