Emingoyak
The Potawatomi word with which Robin Wall Kimmerer names the earth: *"what has been given to us."* The word carries within it the gift—and the gift obliges: the earth is received, never owned. Kimmerer explicitly contrasts it with *"natural resources"* and *"ecosystem services,"* terms that preemptively classify the living as property.
En potawatomi, nous parlons de la terre sous le terme emingoyak : « Ce qui nous a été donné »
Emingoyak doesn’t describe the land—it speaks of our bond to it: “what has been given to us.” Where an ordinary name places an object before us, this one inscribes within the thing itself a recipient and a debt—not a debt to repay, but the duty to care for it and pass it on.
The word fills what our languages gloss over. To say “natural resources” or “ecosystem services,” as Kimmerer writes, is to speak “as if the lives of other beings were our property”; “as if the Earth were not a bowl full of berries, but an open-pit mine, and the spoon a backhoe.” Managerial vocabulary immediately files the living under possession. Emingoyak files it under gift received.
The difference isn’t one of tone but of grammar: a gift remains in transit, waiting to be passed on; property stops at its owner. To name the land emingoyak is to remember that we are not its masters but its stewards—akin to Davi Kopenawa’s urihi, the living forest-earth whose humans are merely inhabitants among others, and which the word “nature” already betrays.