A Link in the Chain
For Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer, a single word—kobade—encompasses both great-grandparents and great-grandchildren: no one stands at the end of the line, each is but a link, held and holding.
She pictures her arms encircling her grandchildren, and theirs encircling theirs in turn. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer, searches for the word to name this gesture that spans the ages—and her language holds it in three syllables: kobade.
English kobade is a word we use to refer to our great-grandparents and our great-grandchildren. It means a link in a chain—a link in the chain between generations, between nations, between states of being, between individuals.
English kobade is a word we use to refer to our great-grandparents and our great-grandchildren. It means a link in a chain—a link in the chain between generations, between nations, between states of being, between individuals.
Simpson learned it from Elder Edna Manitowabi. The word’s strangeness becomes apparent the moment one weighs it: a single term designates both those who precede us by three degrees and those who follow by as many. The elder and the child bear the same name. Where French divides—ancestors on one side, descendants on the other, two words for two directions—kobade holds both ends together. The speaker is not at the end of the line; they are a link, caught between two grips. I am a link in a chain. We are all links in a chain.
The word does not stop at human kinship. Simpson calls her nation a long kobade, cycling through time—a vast kobade weaving through time: a fabric of ties knotted to plant nations, animal nations, rivers, lakes, the cosmos. The chain runs both ways and overflows the bounds of species; to be a link is to be held by what is not oneself.
From this image follows an obligation, and it leans forward. If I am a link, my task is not to contemplate the chain behind me but to extend it ahead: we should give more than we take—so that the kobade to come may survive and thrive. The past ceases to be a heritage to preserve; it becomes a debt paid forward, toward faces we will never see.
What is kobade?
Kobade is a word in Nishnaabemowin that Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, relaying Elder Edna Manitowabi, renders as “a link in a chain.” It names in a single term great-grandparents and great-grandchildren—the two ends that living beings connect—then, by extension, the entire lineage and the nation as a chain cycling through time, bound to all beings. Neither kinship in the narrow sense nor genealogy: a way of knowing oneself a link, held and holding.
Let us set our own vocabulary beside it, not to diminish it but to measure the distance. We have “ancestors” and “descendants”: two words, two directions, and between them a subject standing at the center as if at an observation post. We have “genealogy,” a tree that ascends—the record of who descends from whom, turned upstream. Kobade does the opposite, in two ways. It refuses to sever: one name for both ends, because the same bond runs through them. And it leans downstream: the link matters less for what it receives than for what it passes on. Our language makes lineage an inheritance to inventory; Nishnaabemowin makes it a chain to stretch.
The word leaves one question unanswered. When we think of those who will come a century from now—the children of our children, whom none of us will embrace—do we even have a word to say they are already ours?
Sources cited
- Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance, ed. University of Minnesota Press, 2017, trans. texte original anglais ; rendu français maison.