Image of a dictionary from Public Domain Photos.
Olivia Huynh
B.C.L./J.D. candidate, Faculty of Law, McGill University
June 1 2021
Note: Since the summer of 2020, I have been taking Anishinaabemowin lessons online with Mitch Akerman from the Chigamik Community Health Centre in Midland, Ontario. It is thanks to Mitch and to Professor Aaron Mills at McGill’s Faculty of Law that I have been able to understand and discuss elements of Anishinaabemowin. I have also used the Ojibwe People’s Dictionary throughout for translation and conjugation. However, any mistakes are fully my own.
Much has been made of the relationship between law and culture. Similarly, there has been extensive linguistic scholarship on the relationship between language on the one hand, and culture and perception on the other; the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis is a seminal example. In this Probe, I am interested in bridging these two lines of thought and investigating the relationship between law and language itself. In particular, I will focus on how linguistic features such as verb structure reflect culturally entrenched ideas of personhood in Anishinaabemowin and English. I will review three grammatical features of Anishinaabemowin: animacy, subject-verb structure, and locative suffixes. I will then draw out divergent ideas of personhood by examining how these structures in Anishinaabemowin, and their English counterparts, may reflect particular ways of thinking about persons and agency. Finally, building upon these differences, I will challenge how non-Anishinaabe jurists and anthropologists have represented Anishinaabe ways of understanding the world. Discussions of “personhood” carry deep cultural baggage from the common law and from unchallenged English linguistic structures. Furthermore, these differences implicate how Canadian and Indigenous law interact, particularly in the colonial context. While it is outside the scope of this paper to find a causal relationship between law and language, or to make a conclusive finding on personhood in Anishinaabe law, I hope to show that linguistic structures are not neutral and do have a relationship to legal and cultural ideas of the person.
A first question might be whether there is a relationship between language and law at all. We can start addressing this question by looking at the relationship between language and perception. Benjamin Lee Whorf’s text “The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behaviour to Language” discusses how language shapes what we think, and how we think about it. Whorf quotes Edward Sapir’s work on this point: “…the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group…We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation”. In other words, our conception of the world is not purely a matter of perception. Perception itself is influenced and filtered through language habits, which condition people towards particular ways of understanding and interpreting external events. Language informs how we categorize phenomena. As an example of language habits’ influence on thought, Whorf notes that there is a dichotomy between form and substance in English. He illustrates this principle through common phrases such as “a glass of water”, where the object (a glass of water) is a composite of a form (a glass) plus a conceptually formless substance (“water” on its own generally does not connote a particular shape or body of water). Whorf argues that this idiosyncrasy of the English language has supported characteristic Western philosophies such as “materialism, psycho-physical parallelism, physics”. Significantly, he argues that language is a “system, not just an assemblage of norms”. It is not a passive set of standards employed by humans; rather, language is a system that operates upon human thought and innovation.
If language influences human thought and behaviour at the percept level, it likely has some relationship to law, which often deals with how people categorize and react to certain events. In particular, language relates to how we perceive and categorize others, and therefore how we treat them. These relationships are conceptualized and expressed through language, e.g. “He is my friend”, “I love her”, “I saw them yesterday”. At a basic level, speech and writing allow us to situate ourselves in relation to others, and to therefore identify our relationship to them. The coded presumptions that linguistic structures make about both others and the self (for example, in the above sentences, that the self, the action, and the others are separate and perhaps alienable), are therefore worth examining in the legal and cultural context of personhood.
One difference between English and Anishinaabemowin is that Anishinaabemowin is grammatically gendered according to animacy (similar in some ways to how languages like French or German are gendered according to sexual gender). Nouns are categorized as animate or inanimate, and this categorization affects how related words are conjugated. As an example, here is how two similar sentences are written depending on the animacy of the verb:
Mishiimin miskozi
(The apple is red)
Shkode miskwaa
(The fire is red)
In these sentences, the verb/adjective (miskozi, miskwaa) used means “to be red”, or “is red”. Miskozi and miskwaa are two forms of the same word for “red”, misko. Mishiimin (apple) is animate and uses the animate form (miskozi); shkode (fire) is inanimate and uses the corresponding inanimate form (miskwaa).
In contrast to languages like French where grammatical gender is based on the word’s suffix, there seems to be some cultural dimension to the gender of animacy in Anishinaabemowin. For example, all humans and animals are grammatically animate, and not all objects (or what English speakers would identify as “objects”) are. However, other cases complicate this observation. Some foods are animate but some others are not. Furthermore, some ceremonial objects are animate while some are inanimate. As well, we will see later that animacy may be fluid in some contexts.
For English speakers, the idea of animacy may be intuitively connected to personhood. However, this line of interpretation risks imposing Western ideas of animacy and personhood onto Anishinaabemowin grammar. In particular, it risks importing Western suppositions that conflate animacy and personhood. For example, as Maureen Matthews and Roger Roulette ask, are qualities such as “sentience, mobility, self-movement, or even reproduction” necessarily associated with animate nouns, and are these qualities related to personhood in Anishinaabe thought? To try to avoid this imposition, I am not going to address the question of whether animate nouns are given personhood by virtue of their animacy, because I think it is the wrong question. Instead, I am going to consider how it reflects an emphasis on relationality. The question I will ask around animacy is not “is X a person?”, but rather “how does X’s quality of animacy change in the context of different relationships?”.
In their chapter “‘Are all stones alive?’: Anthropological and Anishinaabe approaches to personhood”, Matthews and Roulette tackle this relationship between animacy and personhood. They begin their piece with a citation from I.A. Hallowell’s anthropological work with the Anishinaabe of the Upper Berens River: “Since stones are grammatically animate, I once asked an old man: Are all the stones we see about us here alive? He reflected a long while and then replied, ‘No! But some are’”. This passage reflects the complexity of animacy: it is not directly analogous to personhood or life, but it may have some relation to those qualities. As well, there can be both alive and non-alive referents within the class created by the word itself, even if the word is always grammatically animate. In this case, the category of things denoted by the word “stones” contains both alive and non-alive members, even though “stone” is grammatically animate. This exchange also shows that there is a particularity to the quality of alive-ness: it seems that whether a specific thing is alive cannot be determined by reference to its broader classification. In this sense, the animacy of nouns is fixed but the life of the actual things may not be.
In addition to this specificity, there seems to be an element of fluidity and relationality around the agency of things, which is not tied to a particular noun or grammatical gender but in fact becomes evident through the use of different words and genders. Matthews and Roulette discuss a water drum belonging to a “renowned Anishinaabe medicine man”, Naamiwan, from the community of Pauingassi. Naamiwan’s water drum later ended up in a museum, then was part of a botched repatriation attempt to an unrelated Anishinaabe community. It was eventually returned to Pauingassi. Matthews and Roulette note that when Omishoosh, Naamiwan’s grandson, came to see the drum in the museum, he used a variety of terms to refer to it. These include mitigwakik (“water drum”, animate), dewe’igan (“drum”, animate), and madwe’igan (“any thing to strike or beat upon”, inanimate). In this case, the water drum is described with both animate and inanimate nouns.
In regards to the drum’s animacy, Matthews and Roulette explain that, “At certain moments, drums can also experience a transformation in terms of relational possibilities”. The use of “transformation” here is interesting, suggesting a change in the subject itself and not just in its experience of external conditions. It echoes Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark’s explanation that “stories also describe how our relationships to one another are generated through our actions. As we engage with one another, we transform and are transformed”, referring to a sense of transformation in Anishinaabe law. Matthews and Roulette later link relational possibilities to personhood, writing, “In the case of Naamiwan’s water drum, its Ojibwe personhood is similarly relational, shifting meaning from person to object within the dictates of its social connections”. Quoting Gosden and Knowles, they argue that “agency is a relational process”. These passages describe a form of agency that is not inherent to the self, but which transforms in the context of different relationships and social connections. In this context, the use of animate nouns does not indicate the a priori personhood of a thing. Instead, animacy is deployed in a way that reflects a relational conception of personhood and agency. The use of grammatical animacy plays on this relationality instead of fixing things as agential or non-agential, persons or non-persons.
English does not have a direct equivalent to animacy in Anishinaabemowin. However, similarly to how words have gendered connotations in English despite a lack of grammatical gender (think “handsome” vs. “pretty”), they can carry cultural assumptions about agency. Objects which are generally thought of as inanimate (e.g. rocks) may be perceived to move or act based on natural forces, while it may be presumed that people act based on agency. For example, a sentence like “The rock rolled down the hill” carries an assumption that the rock is being moved by external forces (gravity, being pushed by someone, etc.) rather than moving agentially, even though that information is not explicitly given in the statement, and even though the rock is positioned as the subject. Importantly, this implicit information or assumption is given by the noun, “rock”, and not by its particular relationship to other nouns. It is not the rock’s relationship to the hill or to other things which denotes inanimacy, but rather the connotations of the word “rock” itself (e.g. the assumptions about agency do not change if it is rolling off a table rather than down a hill). In contrast to Anishinaabemowin, ideas of animacy and life in English therefore disclose information about a thing’s substance, form, and categorization, rather than its relations to others at a given time.
The structure of verbs in Anishinaabemowin is also quite different from that of English. Notably, the majority of Anishinaabemowin words are verbs, while the majority of English words are nouns. Here, we will focus on verbs used for animate things, or verb animate intransitives (VAIs). In English sentences, nouns largely stay the same (subject to the remnants of the case system), and the verb is conjugated. The verb is also separate from the noun within the sentence. For first and second person VAIs in Anishinaabemowin, the noun and verb are not separate. For example:
Nbimishkaa
(I am paddling)
Gbimishkaa
(You are paddling)
In both these sentences, the verb constitutes a full sentence on its own (containing the ideas of person and action that English expresses in three words). The root word, bimishkaa, can be used on its own to mean “he or she is paddling”.
The use of locative suffixes, which associate words with place or location, are another significant difference between English and Anishinaabemowin. The suffix accomplishes what is usually done through prepositions in English. For example:
gami
(lake)
gammiing
(at the lake)
In this case, the changed suffix indicates a relationship of place to the noun: something or someone is at the lake.
Like the use of animacy, VAIs and locative suffixes in Anishinaabemowin reflect an emphasis on relationships. In a conjugated VAI like “Nbimishkaa”, the verb is the central unit of the sentence. Unlike nouns, particularly in English, verbs represent a relationship: an action that connects the subject to its environment, to others, or to the self. In Anishinaabemowin, the self (in this case, represented as the n- prefix that is added to “bimishkaa”) appears as a particular modality of the action or relationship, rather than the other way around. By contrast, in English (again subject to a partial case system), verbs are conjugated to match nouns: actions are generated by, and situated in relation to, things. Locative suffixes in Anishinaabemowin similarly give a sense of relationality. The noun itself is modified by the relationship of proximity/place; the thing is transformed by this relationship. This grammatical operation contrasts again with English, whose use of prepositions does not change the noun itself. In a sentence like “I am paddling on the lake”, the “I” and “the lake” retain their separate forms regardless of their relationship to each other. Their meaning is given through these forms (I, lake), which verbs and prepositions simply connect rather than transform at the level of word structure.
English sentence structure’s sense that qualities are located in a thing’s substance or form, and that these qualities precede and influence relationships rather than the other way around, reflects how personhood and rights operate in liberal forms of law. As Aaron Mills notes, crucial premises of Canadian constitutionalism include “the primacy of the self, individual autonomy…[and] rights discourse”. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a cornerstone of Canadian constitutional law, demonstrates how these rights attach to persons. For example, s. 7 of the Charter states “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice”. Similarly, s. 15 asserts, “Every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and, in particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability”. The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights describes the “inalienable rights of all members of the human family” in its preamble. In these cases, rights are premised on the subject’s membership in the category of “persons”, so as to fall into the groups of “everyone” mentioned in the Charter, or “members of the human family” in the UN Declaration. The language of “inalienable rights” further situates these rights statically in the person, rather than looking at how freedoms and responsibilities are modulated through relationships.
In addition to this focus on the category of “persons”, there is an underlying sense of propriety to Canadian rights discourse. The language used to delimit rights frames them as things which belong to persons. Rights discourse transforms relationships between different actors (governments, citizens, etc.) and the freedom and potentiality for action and inaction into things which can be allocated among rights-holders. This allocation depends, at least in theory, on an individualistic and atomized conception of the self: the qualities of personhood precede relationships with others, and rights are held by these individual persons regardless of how relationships may change. In practice, rights are a framework generated and upheld through collective structures such as governments and political communities. However, Canadian legal discourse reflects the primacy of nouns in English by conceptualizing these duties and freedoms as rights and giving them to persons. In theory, the holders of rights can then deploy them against other actors.
The Canadian focus on rights, held by persons and to things, has been problematic for its interactions with Indigenous systems of law, a relationship which is already underscored by the Canadian state’s historical and ongoing colonial violence towards Indigenous peoples. In many cases, rights discourse can preclude the practice and application of Indigenous law. It particularly conflicts with principles of reciprocity and interdependence in Anishinaabe law. Stark gives an example of this violence through the Wisconsin government’s attempts to control wolf populations. Wisconsin proposed a wolf cull, which was opposed by Anishinaabe in the state because it was “antithetical to the particular relationship Anishinaabe have to wolves, whom we see as our brothers”. While the state recognized Anishinaabe treaty rights regarding wolves, it framed these as a right to “resources”, rather than recognizing Anishinaabe understandings of relationship; Stark writes, “The rights framework was deployed by the state to foreclose conversations about our responsibilities to wolves, positioning wolves as ‘resources’ that could be portioned out between the tribes and the state in their management”. This situation illustrates what Mills identifies as the “violence of colonial translation from an Indigenous constitutional context into a liberal one”. By translating the decision-making power regarding wolf hunts into the language of “rights”, the Wisconsin government displaced the relationship from its original context of Anishinaabe law into the framework of American law, situating humans as persons and rights-holders and wolves as objects or resources. This translation effectively erased any elements of reciprocity from the legal discourse around the wolves, conceptualizing the dynamic as one of power, entitlement, and ownership.
The violence of translation shows that language plays an active role in law. Specifically, the language of Canadian law precludes Anishinaabe law as a framework for understanding responsibilities. Mills writes that Anishinaabe language and ceremonies “serve to disclose the Anishinaabe lifeworld: the set of ontological, cosmological, and epistemological understandings which situate us in creation and thus which allow us to orient ourselves in all our relationships in a good way”. Language is not a passive vehicle for describing obligations; it is part of the lifeworld which is generative of law, and which provides the conceptual framework for understanding law. Similar to Whorf’s observation that language does not neutrally report experience but rather conditions how we interpret and make sense of perception, linguistic habits shape how we conceive of such fundamental concepts as responsibility and personhood. The use of English and its conceptual baggage around the importance of things and the inviolability of the self are therefore not neutral features or mere linguistic quirks, but elements which reflect non-neutral ways of explaining personhood and rights.
A natural question at this point may be “what is personhood in Anishinaabe law?”. Is it a more relational conception of “person” than Canadian law? If a system of law is not premised on ownership and rights allocation, does it even need the categories of persons and non-persons?
These are important questions, but I do not feel like I am well positioned to answer them, being situated firmly in a Canadian lifeworld. Instead, what this Probe is better positioned to do is examine how English and common law presumptions have influenced non-Anishinaabe attempts to interpret Anishinaabe law and categories. This is not an argument that non-Anishinaabe people should avoid learning about Anishinaabe law; instead, the point is to show how important it is to be aware of the hidden suppositions and priorities that people bring with them when they approach other systems of law.
In her article “Ojibwa Taxonomy and Percept Ambiguity”, Mary B. Black examines A.I. Hallowell’s anthropological study of the Anishinaabe of the Berens River. Hallowell argued that the Anishinaabe had a “covert category” of persons. Black explains that Hallowell thought that “the Ojibwa do not recognize this class as such, but the belief system structure is more truly represented by inferring it from [Hallowell’s] data”. Accordingly, Hallowell’s charts of Anishinaabe folk taxonomy emphasize the category of persons. However, delineating the taxonomic categories created certain difficulties. For example, Black noted an “instability” in categories: some entities could shift between categories in Hallowell’s folk taxonomy. She explained: “For the distribution of some of these properties is not only variable among living things, it is capable of constant reallocation among them. That is one of the basic tenets of the belief system, and to force the entities into a rigid mold would violate that system”. In other words, she found that entities’ ability to shift fluidly between categories was an important part of Anishinaabe taxonomy.
While Hallowell’s study is deeply impressive, the focus on categorizing things may reflect anthropologists’ own covert categories. This form of categorization presumes that a primary way of understanding the world is by associating qualities with things. It suggests English habits of thinking about “things” (nouns) as existing independently of actions and relationships (verbs). Hallowell’s categorization prioritized things (humans, animals, etc.) as the primary unit of taxonomy rather than relationships. Similarly, Black’s analysis of “ambiguity” focuses on how entities can shift between categories, rather than on the different relationships and contexts which produce changes in meaning and perception. While these implicit decisions do not necessarily mean that Hallowell or Black’s research is inaccurate, it emphasizes the depth of interpretive frameworks shaped by language. The hidden assumptions that linguistic structures make about the world and about experiences can subtly shape how people approach the study of other cultures, languages, and systems of law.
In conclusion, language is an important part of how we think about law. In particular, linguistic structures and habits often reflect culturally entrenched views about personhood and subjecthood, and these structures and habits can influence where we find or look for meaning when categorizing phenomena. Differences in language appear both at the level of grammatical forms, and at the level of word connotation; for example, nouns referring to humans in English will carry particular connotations about agency. It is especially crucial to be aware of these differences in the context of how legal systems interact, particularly in colonial states. English, and its associated discourses such as Canadian rights discourse, are used to obscure and exclude Indigenous law in decision-making. However, I hope that attending to how language shapes understandings of law can help Canadians to radically challenge the presumptions underlying Canadian law, which often masquerade as neutral structures and universal principles. Mills writes, “Because of liberalism’s view of persons as autonomous and because of its anthropocentric view that only humans are persons, from my perspective it’s a worldview irredeemably committed to violence”. While taking many forms, this violence also occurs at the level of language and its culturally coded meanings. Violence includes using language which centers the subject to impose object-hood on the natural world, while giving the rights to these “objects” to humans, who are framed as rights-holders and therefore as the subjects who exert agency. Canadian law’s approach to the natural world, however, has proven ineffective at stopping large scale ecological threats such as climate change. Among other changes, Canadians need to learn new forms of relating to others and of understanding the natural world to address environmental crises and the ongoing violence of colonialism.
All of the links in this Probe were accessed June 18th, 2021.
Further Reading:
Aaron Mills, “The Lifeworlds of Law: On Revitalizing Indigenous Legal Orders Today” (2016) 61:4 MLJ.
Benjamin Lee Whorf, “The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behaviour to Language” (1943) 1:4 Review of General Semantics 197.
Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark, “Changing the Treaty Question: Remedying the Right(s) Relationship” in Michael Coyle and John Borrows, The Right Relationship: Reimagining the Implementation of Historical Treaties (University of Toronto Press, 2017) 248-275.
Mary B Black, “Ojibwa Taxonomy and Percept Ambiguity” (1977) 5:1 Ethos (published by Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association) 90.
Maureen Matthews and Roger Roulette, “’Are all stones alive?’: Anthropological and Anishinaabe approaches to personhood” in Rethinking Relations and Animism, eds Miguel Astor-Aguilera and Graham Harvey (New York: Routledge, 2018) 173-192.
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