No, No No, No No, No No

In the beginning, there was The Word...

In my youth, I dreamed of being a professional translator. As such, some of my college classes included Intro to Linguistics, four quarters of French and two of Classical Greek (aka Bible study in a foreign language, what with these classes having been taken in the Deep South).

So I have a longstanding love of and interest in languages generally, one I have pursued to some degree in earnest. Thus, it should be no surprise that I have some awareness of the Native influence on local place names across the US.

It's a topic I have wanted to include in this blog from the start but I remain unclear how to proceed. I am reluctant to have this blog be filled to the gills with relatively short, light posts with blurbs like this edited bit of trivia taken from today's Bing homepage quiz:

Pohono is the original name of Bridalveil Fall at California's Yosemite National Park. It is an Ahwahneechee name and means 'Spirit of the Puffing Wind.'

In Classical Greek, the saying "In the beginning there was the word" is not speaking of language per se. It can be roughly translated to mean "God had a thought. Things began with God conceptualizing something and from his thoughts reality sprang forth."

Language is not merely a means for two or more people to try to communicate. It is a record of our collective thoughts, of how we conceptualize things. If we have a word for it, we have an idea for it and this is one reason we sometimes adopt new words from other languages: Because it introduces a new idea for which we don't already have a word.

One of the issues that has caused me to repeatedly redact everything written here and start this blog over is my concerns about what Natives term White Gaze. Much as women often feel oppressed and controlled by the idea of Male Gaze, Natives have similar concerns about Whites.

The similarity of the concepts and terms makes sense. It is a concern about how people generally with more power than themselves see them, interpret them regardless of their actual intentions and actively seek to control the narrative, whether intentionally or not, and threatens to negate the voices and views of the more oppressed group, whether women or Natives, and impose their own.

At least on Twitter, Natives seem to often use the term Colonizers rather than Whites. Their concern for how to define Them and Us is not about skin color per se.

Similarly, one of the sticking points of my efforts to write this blog has been whom to talk about as Native. Among other things, I have a history of writing about not only so-called "Redskins" on this blog, but also African Americans.

Are African Americans Native?

Well, they aren't Native to American soil, but many of them trace their roots to tribal cultures in Africa. Their tribal languages and traditions influence the spoken language and inherited culture of a group of people legally forbidden to learn to read English and try to assimilate to the culture to which they were forcibly exported and this was done with malice aforethought to intentionally make it as easy as possible to keep them oppressed and enslaved.

It is a different methodology but essentially the same goal for how "Redskins" were treated by White Colonizers who were more or less trying to take over all the resources of the world, from far flung natural resources in different lands to the labor of the peoples therein. From what I gather, they were merely Natives who were intentionally uprooted and taken elsewhere against their will.

This blog was not really conceived of as being about the Native influence on the US per se. As stated elsewhere, the original tagline was: Exploring the largely unrecognized Native influences on my own life and society generally.

It was conceived of as being about the underrecognized global influence of tribal peoples whose cultural identity is defined more by kinship ties than by a particular form of government or geographic place as defined by a map outlining where a particular "Nation" supposedly exists.

Nations are imaginary constructs. Humans make them up and agree they exist and sometimes disagree whether or not a paricular one exists or where it begins and ends. They aren't magically more real than the seemingly more nebulous concept of "tribes" that are defined more by the people in them than by a place per se.

Tribes are often mobile peoples. They summer in one location and winter in another. Their relationship to the land is fundamentally different from the people who ascribe to national identities first and foremost and try to own land as individuals, a concept alien for many Native peoples.

This fact may have been a primary source of conflict on what is now known as US soil when Europeans showed up, asked who owned the land and Natives told them "No one owns the land." which Europeans wildly misinterpreted to mean "It's free! We can just take what we want!" rather than "They relate differently to the land and our question doesn't quite parse for them. It's a nonsense question in their eyes."

Some years ago, I used to argue on the internet with people who said awful things like "It's not racism to refuse to hire Blacks who speak Ebonics. They simply aren't articulate enough for the job in question." to which I would reply "President George W. Bush."

Maybe it's not racism per se to say "I won't hire inarticulate Blacks because they are inarticulate and not because they are Black" but somewhere in there racism is still alive and well because we had no problem voting into office a White man so inarticulate he was mocked around the world for it while still in office.

One artifact of African tribal languages that made its way into the speach of Black Americans that got dismissed as mere ignorance is double-negatives. In English, two negatives negate each other, they cancel each other out, so it sounds ignorant to most Whites for Blacks to use such constructs.

However, in some African tribal languages, the double-negative doesn't cancel each other out. It's there for additional emphasis, to say "No, not that!" more strongly and, in fact, some of them will even use triple- and quadruple-negatives to very, very strongly emphasize "No, not that!"

That artifact lives on in the speach of African Americans because we literally forbade Black slaves from learning to read. We insisted they not educate themselves, thus they naturally imposed the grammatical constructs of their Native tongues on what little English they did know.

Their ignorance of English was not due to stupidity on their part. It was imposed intentionally by Whites to control them. The foreign linguistic constructs that live on in the language of so many African Americans is in some sense the kind of Native influence I seek to identify and write about on this blog.

Whatever your ethnicity or cultural background, whatever your preconceived notions of who I am, I'm probably not that. Like very seriously "Not that" and I don't think I can overemphasize that fact. I don't think there are enough "No"s to state my objection to it strongly enough.

The notions of people around me draw dividing lines through me and ask me to pick a side when I fail to be adequately one or the other. I can't pick a side. It's not unlike asking me to lop off an arm.

I am neither here to promote White Gaze nor to serve myself up as someone volunteering to be virtuously nailed to a cross for the benefit of oppressed peoples in my country of origin. I'm just a girl who doesn't fit in anywhere ethnically or culturally who is interested in a particular topic that unfortunately happens to be a hot button topic for many people.

In the words of the half White, half Asian daughter named "Aggie"/Akiko from "The Assassin" (Kung Fu tv series, Season 2):

I am not like us.

That's a scene I can never find on YouTube. Here is a scene with her imploring her father to end his feud:

I'm not on "your" side and I'm not on "their" side. I'm part Native and part White and all efforts to make me choose one side or the other boils down to someone asking me to lop off some part of myself for their convenience, which is a more jagged little pill than I know how to swallow.

This blog -- the concepts and words herein -- will grow out of whatever unique mishmash of multi-cultural knowledge happens to have landed in my brain. The odds are poor it will make anyone happy, probably not even me if history is to judge by.

I'm going to proceed to write it anyway. I need to write it, like it or not.