"The hands have an infinity of pleasure to them. The feel of things, textures, surfaces, rough things like cones and bark, smooth things like stalks and feathers and pebbles rounded by water, the teasing of gossamers . . . the scratchiness of lichen, the warmth of the sun, the sting of hail, the blunt blow of tumbling water, the flow of wind -- nothing that I can touch or that touches me but has its own identify for the hand as much as the eye." (Anna Shepherd, quoted in the Macfarland book, "Landmarks", p.74)
"Wee Geordie" (1955) was a movie about a Scots game keeper's son who refused to give up his identity, even when as a boy he was bullied. He went on to become a hammer-throw champion, wearing his kilt. We attended as a family (I was a high school sophomore) and picked up on his vocabulary, which was full of jargon terminology naming animals by gender, by babies, and so on. He knew all this, which meant he was close to the animals and the land, and his vocabulary prevailed over mockery. For years afterwards we kept the terms alive and even now people try to recall the names for groups of species.
Parallel to the indigenous people who are working to recover and revive their historical languages, before the invaders and missionaries forbade them and punished their use because language is such a major part of identity, is another parallel group that is reviving the indigenous languages of places like Britain, most of them designating occupations or kinds of land. Robert McFarlane has been a leader through his books, like "Landmarks" (2015) which is both texts and nine glossaries.
I'm going to quote a lot: ". . . it is a word-hoard of the astonishing lexis for landscape that exists in the comprision of islands, rivers, strands, fells, lochs, cities, towns, corries, hedgerows, fields and edgelands uneasily known as Britain and Ireland." The tribes of Britain have survived both the sea-rise that drowned Doggerland and hordes of immigrants in the past. This way of thinking has become so popular that schools use the idea for curricula and artists illustrate the concepts. It draws the people back to the land and its uses, the ecologies we have neglected.
Many decades later than "Wee Georgie", I was asked to sub at Piegan Institute because of an emergency. Me and my Blkft vocab of a dozen words, at least three of which can't be used in a polite context (like oozie and supputsies or another word that I've forgotten that meant "down there" and made my translater, a middle-aged woman, laugh hard). On political grounds the junior high kids had nothing but contempt for me, but we sort of got along. I asked what words in Blckft they knew and what they meant. A graceful and intelligent girl went to the blackboard (by then a whiteboard -- no political meaning -- purely mercantile) and wrote all the names for different kinds of horses that she knew, maybe a dozen terms related to color, temperament, age, conformation, and so on. She would be middle-aged now but I don't remember her name. These were genuine Blkft terms that I had never heard, for an animal the People didn't have until the end of the 18th century, but quickly took into their lives along the ways the dogs had made. For the Plains tribes horses are part of their identity.
The words themselves are less important than that they are access to the land. Not just some theory of ownership or boundaries, but the actual sensory characteristics of daily interaction that we tend to lose. The bodily sensations of revolving doors and rising elevators are strong and real, but no one stays in them as anything but transitions. Cities are transitions and transactions, with grocery stores as jewelled caves of sensory life even if chilled, packaged, priced, and contaminated, and with movie houses now retreating from the presentation of fantasies with no smell or taste. Department stores give way to mail order. Our images suffer.
A few decades ago Narcisse Blood and Ryan Heavyhead set out to remap the old trails and camps of the People. They took a GPS and walked the way to record it for computer maps, learning that berry patches marked places where berry-eaters stayed a while and that in the dog days the patches of thick growth or steep banks were avoided because it was too hard to drag a travois through them. They soon found that the horse days meant longer intervals with stops for grass and water.
No one thought of including the contemporary, but another set of historians went down the east slope of the Rockies recording distinctive mountains and passes, picturing them with cameras to show images with lectures, referring to Old Swan's map. I suspect that today's people could be mapped with reference to pow-wows, though also there are well-traveled drug routes, often from rez to university and back, depending on chosen identities that don't refer to geology or even ecology, which are features of the land rather than the culture.
Language is what holds the maps and identity-images, defying the lay of the land and the shift of the seasons. When we have words for what is occupied and useful, recorded in the senses, we know who we are. The richness of the world builds our brains if we let it, if we can get away from the stereotypes, the second-hand versions except when a glossary is needed. Sometimes I get so impatient with people who stand looking at Glacier Park and say only, "It's so beautiful," or who drive through the prairie saying, "Too bad we have to waste all this time since there's nothing here," that I'm tempted to slap them.
Driving up Highway 89 one doesn't just travel in a beautiful place, drenched in sweet clover, pounded by hail, constantly transformed by cloud shadow and sun, but also this "way", this grassy rain shadow, has been traveled from Alaska to the tip of South America by every animal that has lived here, including humans. Because humans can either change themselves to fit better, esp. if they have the words to exchange with others who have been there; or they can change what is around them if only by carrying stones to weight the edges of their lodges; or they can move on. If they can imagine a better place and maybe find a new word for it.
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