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%.

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?”

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?

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.

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.

English

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

English

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.

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.

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: the descent that makes Sky and Earth our oldest parents. The grammar of animacy: 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.