Grammaire de l'animéité
The phrase by which the translator of Robin Wall Kimmerer renders the English *"grammar of animacy."* In Potawatomi—the Anishinaabe language of the author’s lost childhood—the language itself divides beings into animate and inanimate, and counts far more than humans among the animate: plants, rocks, water, mountains. It is not the speaker who chooses to treat the tree as a subject; it is the structure of the language that compels it. Where English—and French—have only *"it"* for the non-human, Potawatomi conjugates the living as a person.
Un professeur de langue de ma connaissance m’a expliqué que la grammaire reflète la façon dont nous établissons nos relations. Une grammaire de l’animéité nous inciterait peut-être à repenser nos modes de vie et notre rapport au monde.
The key word is grammar. Kimmerer isn’t saying we should speak poetically about trees; she observes that her ancestral language already does so, without any deliberate intent. The distinction between animate and inanimate is built into the conjugation, not the poet’s skill. “It’s all about pronouns,” she writes: calling a maple someone rather than something isn’t a rhetorical flourish—it’s a rule of the language that predetermines whether it is a subject or an object.
The stakes are as much moral as they are linguistic. When we call a tree something, Kimmerer explains, “we turn it into an object; we absolve ourselves of any moral responsibility toward it.” Her student Carla objects that speaking of it as a person would be anthropomorphism—the biologist’s sin. But animacy doesn’t project anything human onto the maple: it acknowledges that it is a being, without reducing it to a “human in fur.”
Hence the distinction that defines the entire entry. A grammar of animacy is not poetic personification. Personification is an ornament the speaker adds at will; they could just as easily do without it. Grammar, on the other hand, is binding: it exists in the language before it exists in speech. Like puhpowee or kené, it reveals a part of reality that our languages kept sealed—not through stylistic choice, but through their very structure.