Learning the Grammar of Animacy1

Puhpowee translates as the force that causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight. Biologist Robin Kimmerer was stunned that such a word existed. For all its technical vocabulary, Western science has no such term, no word to hold this mystery. You would think that biologists, of all people, would have words for life. But in Western scientific language, terminology is used to define the boundaries of our knowing. What lies beyond our grasp remains unnamed. A citizen member of the Potawatomi Nation, Kimmerer immersed herself in a Post‐it note world of words from this almost‐lost language and unexpectedly crossed into an unsuspected grammar of verbs—and a connective new worldview.