Wild Like Flowers, Forward: Yawe, a note

The People of the Seventh Fire foretold devastation, but they also foretold a choice. A choice to stop; to nurture awareness; to learn a language of interdependence not dominance, of community not col

This is the introduction page of my second book, Wild Like Flowers: The Restoration of Relationship Through Regeneration. You can buy the book here. Or, you can read it here.

Forward: Yawe, A Note

Bodewadminwen is the ancient language of the Potawatomi—a nation of Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains and Great Lakes region of North America. A dialect of Algonquian, Bodewadminwen is a living language that understands nouns and verbs not as either male or female but as animate or inanimate. Perceived through this living grammar, a “grammar of animacy” as Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, a tree or a cow or a carrot is not a something, but a someone, transforming communication into community—harvest into communion.[1]

The Potawatomi foretold of The People of the Seventh Fire, a coming time when all species would weep under the hand of extinction, when the verdant and clear waters of rivers and streams would pervert under the weight of property rights, when the language of the wind would become too dense and too toxic to breathe—to nourish and to heal and to speak. It would be a time when animals and life and the wind itself would turn away from the ravaging appetites of human beings.