[...] the English language is a language of objectification of the living world, right? When we see that beautiful moon, we say “it” is shining; those swallows, “it” is chittering as “it” flies overhead. In English, we “it” the living world, whereas in Potawatomi that’s not possible. We use the same grammar for each other as we do for our plant and animal relatives. As a writer, particularly as a science writer, I am so frustrated by the need to conform to the objectification of the Western scientific paradigm and refer to my teachers and companions as “its.” And so, interrogating the animacy of Bode’wadmi, my own language, there is a beautiful word that we have that means just “an earth being.” This was given to me by one of my language teachers: bmaadiziiaki. You know, it’s a beautiful word and will never find its way into English, but aki, and then that little sound at the end, ki, comes from the word for earth—for the animate, living earth. And so I proposed that we use ki as a neologism, as a new word, instead of it, so that we don’t have “it” swallows and owls and foxes and dandelions—so that we can say, Ki is growing in the yard, ki is running along the hedgerow. Not “it,” but “ki.” Try it!
Robin Wall Kimmerer, "Kinship is a Verb"
