---
title: "No Living Being Is a Thing"
sousTitre: "Two peoples refuse to call the living world 'it.' One through grammar—Robin Wall Kimmerer, Potawatomi. The other through genealogy—Hirini Moko Mead, Māori. The same refusal, by two paths that do not resemble each other."
description: "Kimmerer (Potawatomi) and Mead (Māori) both prevent us from saying 'it' of the living—one through grammar, the other through whakapapa. Differences before the common threshold."
date: 2026-06-24
lang: en
tradition: potawatomi
auteurs: ["Robin Wall Kimmerer", "Hirini Moko Mead"]
---
# No Living Being Is a Thing

One word is enough to turn a being into a thing. We say *it* of a tree, a
river, a fox—and in an instant, what we speak of ceases to have an inside. The
pronoun is so small we don’t hear it fall. But it cuts: on one side, those of
whom we say *he* or *she*, whom we cannot reduce without offense; on the other,
what we designate with an unthinking *it*, and which immediately becomes
manipulable, classifiable, exploitable. Language makes the division before
thought does.

Two people, each in their own tradition, stumbled over this small word and
refused to let it have its way. Robin Wall Kimmerer, botanist and citizen of the
Potawatomi Nation, encountered it in the grammar of the English she speaks and
the ancestral language she is relearning. Hirini Moko Mead, elder and professor
of Ngāti Awa, keeps it at a distance by an entirely different means: not grammar,
but genealogy. They do not say the same thing, and above all, they do not go
about it in the same way. This is the gap we must hold first, before seeking
what they share.

## The Grammar That Cannot Say "It"

Kimmerer recounts her adult struggle to relearn Potawatomi, a language nearly
erased by the residential schools. What discourages her at first is that
everything in it is a verb.

> Only 30% of English words are verbs. But Potawatomi privileges action; it is a
> language of verbs, and their proportion reaches 70%.
>
> — **Robin Wall Kimmerer**, *Tresser les herbes sacrées*, ch. « Apprendre la grammaire du vivant ». éd. after the French translation by Véronique Minder, Le lotus et l'éléphant, 2021.

A language where the berry, the hill, the shore are verbs. Flipping through the
dictionary, she pauses, incredulous, at *wiikwegamaa*: "to be in a state of
creek." A creek is not a thing set there—it is something the water *does*—to
be-creek, for the time of a shoreline. Her first reaction is irritation: why
complicate things? Then she understands she had been holding, without seeing it,
the heart of another way of dwelling in the world.

For these verbs are conjugated along a dividing line that is not ours. Where
European languages sort nouns into masculine and feminine, Potawatomi separates
the animate from the inanimate—and places almost everything that lives, and many
things we believe inert, on the side of the animate. One does not ask of an apple
"what is it?" but "who is it?"

*[yawe]* *Yawe*: in Kimmerer’s usage, the verb **to be** reserved for the animate. Of a table, one says *Dopwen yewe*, "that is a table"; but of an apple, *Mshimin yawe*— "Apple, that one *is*." "To speak of beings endowed with life and spirit, we say *yawe*."

The flaw, then, is no longer in the Indigenous language but in ours. It is
English—and French with it—that forces an impoverished choice.

> English grammar traps us in this reductive choice: what is nonhuman is a thing,
> it, and what is human must be gendered, equally reductively—he or she. Where are
> our words to express the simple existence of another living being? Where is our
> yawe?
>
> — **Robin Wall Kimmerer**, *Tresser les herbes sacrées*, ch. « Apprendre la grammaire du vivant ». éd. after the French translation by Véronique Minder, Le lotus et l'éléphant, 2021.

This is what Kimmerer calls, in a phrase of her own and not a Potawatomi word,
*the grammar of animacy*. It is not a courtesy one extends, nor a figure of
speech: it is a constraint of the verb. In this language, one cannot open one’s
mouth about a living being without treating it grammatically as a subject.
Respect is not added afterward; it is already in the conjugation. Conversely, to
say *it* of a salmon or a maple is, for her, to deprive it of what makes it
someone—*someone, not something*. Here, language stands guard at the threshold of
reification.

And for Kimmerer, the stakes are not merely about respect. The *it* does not
merely lack courtesy: it opens the door. Once the being becomes a thing, nothing
holds back the hand.

> When we say the tree is not someone but something, we turn that maple into an
> object; we place a barrier between us and the tree, absolving ourselves of any
> moral responsibility toward it and simultaneously authorizing its exploitation.
>
> — **Robin Wall Kimmerer**, *Tresser les herbes sacrées*, ch. « Apprendre la grammaire du vivant ». éd. after the French translation by Véronique Minder, Le lotus et l'éléphant, 2021.

From pronoun to exploitation, the path is short: "to call a living land
*something* is to turn it into *natural resources*." Reification is not a lapse of
taste; it is the first gesture of domination—and the grammar of animacy severs it
at the root, in the word.

## The Genealogy That Forbids Being Alone

Hirini Moko Mead does not approach the living through grammar. He approaches it
through kinship—and through a word that, in Māori, means both genealogy and the
place one occupies in the world: *whakapapa*. It is often translated as
"genealogical tree," and it is one; but its primary function is not to classify
ancestors, but to situate a living being among the living.

    In short, whakapapa is belonging. Without it an individual is outside looking in.
  
In short, whakapapa is belonging. Without it, the individual remains outside,
looking in.

Everything lies in that *outside*. Without whakapapa, one is not a person without
papers: one is without a place. To recite one’s descent is to connect to a *hapū*,
to a tribe, to a land where one may set foot—what the Māori call *tūrangawaewae*,
the place from which one has the right to stand. But this descent, traced back to
its source, does not stop at human ancestors: it ascends, Mead writes, to the
gods, and through them to Rangi and Papa, Sky and Earth, the first parents of the
cosmos. The first ancestor is not a man. If Earth is the grandmother from whom we
descend, she cannot be a thing: she is family.

*[whakapapa, tūrangawaewae]* *Whakapapa* ("fa-ka-PA-pa"): the genealogy that links a person to their kin and, step by step, to the forces of the world. *Tūrangawaewae*: literally "a place for the feet to stand"—the land where whakapapa grants you the right to belong.

But—and this is where Mead decisively parts ways with Kimmerer—this bond is not
inscribed in every sentence one utters. It must be *known*. Whakapapa is
knowledge one inherits, learns, recites; a skilled orator is one who knows it
surely. One may lack it. One may have forgotten it, or never received it—and then,
precisely, one remains *outside, looking in*. Kinship with the world is not
guaranteed by the language one speaks: it is carried by a memory that must be
kept alive.

## Two Paths That Do Not Overlap

It would be easy, and false, to unite these two thoughts under a convenient
formula—"Indigenous peoples, they know nature is alive." The formula erases
precisely what matters: Kimmerer and Mead do not prevent reification in the same
place, nor by the same means.

For Kimmerer, the refusal lies in **grammar**. It operates sentence by sentence,
whether one wills it or not. A child learning Potawatomi conjugates the animate
without thinking, as a French child agrees the feminine: the language compels
them to treat the berry as a subject before they have any idea about nature. It
is involuntary, mechanical, and that is precisely its strength—one cannot escape
it in speech.

For Mead, the refusal lies in **genealogy**. It does not operate in the verb but
in a narrative one must know and be able to unfold. Nothing in Māori grammar
requires treating a river as an ancestor; it is whakapapa, learned knowledge,
that establishes it. One speaks despite oneself; the other is transmitted and
can be lost.

*[distinguer]* **Do not confuse.** A grammar (Kimmerer) imposes itself on every utterance without choice. A genealogy (Mead) is known, recited, transmitted—and can be lacking. *The grammar of animacy* is Kimmerer’s phrase; *yawe* and *wiikwegamaa* are attested Potawatomi words; *whakapapa* is an attested Māori word. Three distinct things, which no generic "animism" should merge.

Hence two different regimes. The grammar of animacy governs *how one speaks* of
the living: it weighs on language, not first on the speaker’s position. Whakapapa
governs *where one stands* among the living: it situates, grants or denies a
place, a right, a land. One is a way of speaking; the other, a way of belonging.
One can imagine a Potawatomi who speaks correctly without knowing how to recite
their lineage, and a Māori who knows theirs in a language whose grammar no longer
distinguishes animate from inanimate. The two bulwarks do not rise at the same
threshold.

## The Threshold They Share

These two paths, starting from opposite points, end up stumbling against the same
door. And only after holding the gap can we name what unites them—without
diluting it.

First, in neither case is the refusal of *it* a metaphor or a nicety. It is a
**structure**. A structure of language in Kimmerer, a structure of kinship in
Mead—but in both cases, something harder than a feeling: an order that holds in
place, that one inherits and that obliges. One does not decide, one morning, to
respect the berry or the river. Grammar has already decided; or else genealogy.

Next—and this is the sharpest point—both **reverse the direction of the gesture**.
Our culture, when it wishes to do well, *grants* dignity to the living: it
recognizes its value, extends courtesies, sometimes confers rights. This gesture,
however generous, assumes one stands above, at the source: the one who grants
status held it first, and could take it back. Kimmerer and Mead undo this
position of superiority. *Yawe* is there before we deliberate: the apple *is* a
being, we do not confer it upon it. And we descend from Earth—we do not adopt it
into the family circle out of kindness. In both thoughts, the human does not
bestow kinship on the world: they discover it, and discover at the same time that
they were never outside. It is not a promotion granted to the living; it is an
illusion lost about oneself—that of having ever been the only subject amid things.

This is where the difference between the two paths ceases to be a flaw in their
coming together and becomes its richness. If one wishes to escape the language
that reifies, Kimmerer shows that it can be done through the verb—relearning to
say *who*, not *what*. Mead shows that it can be done through memory—relearning
where one comes from, until one can no longer treat as a thing what one proceeds
from. Grammar and genealogy are not two names for the same operation: they are
two doors, opened from two sides, onto the same room.

What remains is what each deposits in our language, where these words are
lacking. [*Whakapapa*](https://viasophia.org/lexique/whakapapa/): the descent that makes Sky and Earth
our oldest parents. [*The grammar of animacy*](https://viasophia.org/lexique/grammaire-animeite/): the
part of a language that compels us to speak of the living as a subject. One may
wonder which of the two bulwarks is the stronger—one that is spoken without
willing it, or one that must be learned to avoid losing it. The question remains
open. But both say, from two edges, something our small word *it* makes us forget
with every sentence: no living being is a thing, and it is not for us to decide.

---

**À lire aussi**

- [De qui descend le monde](https://viasophia.org/reenchanter/2026-06-24-de-qui-descend-le-monde/)
- [Le don qui circule](https://viasophia.org/reenchanter/2026-06-13-minidewak-le-don/)
- [La terre remémorée](https://viasophia.org/reenchanter/2026-06-10-remembered-earth/)
- [Urihi](https://viasophia.org/reenchanter/2026-06-10-urihi/)

## Sources

- Robin Wall Kimmerer, *Tresser les herbes sacrées* — Le lotus et l'éléphant, 2021, trans. Véronique Minder
- Hirini Moko Mead, *Tikanga Māori: Living by Māori Values* — Huia Publishers, 2003, trans. rendu français maison (œuvre en anglais, courtes citations attribuées)


Canonical source : https://viasophia.org/en/reenchanter/2026-06-24-nul-vivant-n-est-une-chose/