Scholars and activists are increasingly pointing to Indigenous Peoples worldwide as having solutions to the climate crisis. They are primarily interested in the technological practices of Indigenous Peoples, such as cultural burning, water systems engineering, and other forms of ecological stewardship that have protected and enhanced biodiversity for millennia. Focusing on technical solutions, however, is superficial. When we practice our ceremonial traditions and embody our traditional philosophies in daily practice, appropriate land stewardship ensues, benefitting the entire ecosystem. Technical land stewardship practices only self-replicate because our ecological ethics, which are transmitted across generations through idiomatic language, instruct us to do so. Collective commitment to good caretaking of land is a result of cultural reproduction, catalyzed by linguistic reproduction.
As globalization accelerates the cultural assimilation of Indigenous societies, our participation in the very industrial systems that contribute to the climate crisis grows. Language loss inevitably follows, due in part to the limited ability of Indigenous lexicons to support daily discourse that is disconnected from our traditional cultures. This is among the foremost threats to the survival of Indigenous languages, exacerbating the erosion of cultural mandates that have sustained our mutually beneficial relationships to land for generations.
One of the most widely proposed—and contentious— strategies to address language loss is the coinage of new words. Lexical innovation based on our alleged need to interact with settler-colonial society using our language requires importing new terms and integrating their associated concepts, which have emerged from a culturally contrasting ethos that can be found at the core of the climate crisis. The importing of “foreign” concepts often resonates as ontologically treacherous and begs the question of whether new glossaries containing concepts epistemologically divergent from Maskoke worldview can still be genuinely classified as “our language.”
The author's partner, Tawna Little, and their children Mekkaneko and Hemokke taking turns pounding acorns to make flour.
Maskoke is not absent of loan words from settler colonial languages. Still, importation has classically been gradual. In Maskoke, first speakers have circumvented the admittance of culturally counterintuitive concepts by bifurcating worldviews according to language. A common reply from first-speakers upon translation inquiries from second-language learners is, “That’s English. We don’t say that.” A simultaneous phenomenon, many fluent-speaking Elders today struggle to converse in Maskoke without inserting a profusion of English because the Maskoke lexicon lacks terminology compatible with their daily lifestyle.
Another concern over adopting newly coined words is that they tend to be nouns, rather than verbs, and the verbto-noun ratio will become progressively disproportionate. Our ancient lexicon contains innumerable verbs seldom voiced today. For example, upon first encountering the infinitive wenetv (to gut), I pondered why I’ve only heard the descriptive equivalent, fekce en cvwetv (to remove [animal] guts). Because gutting an animal is no longer part of the daily collective Maskoke experience, the single verb is scarcely used, thereby consigning it to archaic status.
The fact that we are facing linguistic obsolescence is based on the notion that our traditional lifeways are obsolete. That is true only if we submit to industrial civilization’s ongoing displacement of our culture and its reproduction. Making osafke, a signature Maskoke drink, requires much work, each step of the process described with autonomous verbs. First, the community plants corn seeds that were saved and sorted from the previous year’s harvest. They water and sing to the corn throughout the growing cycle, which is eventually harvested. Once parched and shelled, the corn is placed into a hardwood mortar and pounded with a large and heavy pestle. It is then winnowed and sifted using different styles of baskets made from rivercane, which took time and effort to harvest, split into strips, soak, and weave. Once the desired corn size is reached from pounding, it is separated and cooked in lye made from hardwood tree species that were felled, bucked, split, and seasoned, then burned to ashes that are strained repeatedly with hot water. This ancient Maskoke custom of cooking maize in an alkaline solution ensures nutrient bioavailability, increases protein quality, and neutralizes phytic acid, among other health benefits.
All these steps are immensely time consuming and laborious, leading many people to purchase products in the industrial market economy. Language speakers who do not regularly participate in all stages of the osafke-making cycle likely lack a command of the verbs that are integral to the process. In just this one domain of Maskoke foodways that are dependent on ecologically-rooted lifeways, there are over 30 verbs fundamental to making osafke, many of which are not applicable in other contexts.
If the community is not regularly making osafke or harvesting and processing acorns, applying prescribed fire on the landscape, splitting rivercane to make baskets for utilitarian use, sowing vegetable seeds, and intensively rotating livestock in a holistic management system to promote soil health, sequester carbon, and improve the local hydrological cycle, someone or something else is filling the energy void to ensure the supply of industrially sourced food and other modern conveniences. Those entities are fossil fuels and globally exploited labor.
Learning harvesting and processing skills.
Maskoke idiomatic language includes ancient teachings counter to material accumulation, instead reinforcing ideologies of minimalism. Reproducing language that summons our traditional values is how we constrain our collective ecological footprint. Thus, Indigenous languages and ecologically regenerative lifeways are mutually reinforced. Instead of altering our languages to participate in an increasingly globalized world, we must change the way we live and let our language guide the process.
For some Indigenous Peoples, these realities beckon us to eschew cultural erosion and language shift, ensuring that our climate-positive societies persist. For others, it is a call to decolonize and reIndigenize, to return to the core of our indigeneity steeped in ecology. Regardless of the status of our community’s cultural and linguistic vibrancy, the climate crisis does not discriminate in the ways it threatens Indigenous languages and lifeways. One major concern is the redistribution of animal and plant species and changes to our traditional practices in the agricultural and built environments. These cultural shifts hinder the use of our language in daily practices. Indigenous Peoples are not to blame for the climate crisis, but our Peoples must adapt to ensure our cosmologies and lifeways are inheritable by unborn generations. Adaptation must occur through the lens of our traditional worldviews, and sometimes that means incorporating—after careful spiritual discernment—emerging solutions from western science. Abandoning land-based practices in exchange for industrial civilization, however, is not the answer.
Indigenous societies most successful at avoiding cultural erosion and rapid language shift are those committed to ancient subsistence economies. These are places where biodiversity is enhanced through traditional land-based practices reproduced through intergenerationally transmitted idiomatic language. While there is a spectrum of subsistence economic models, choosing closer proximity to industrial capitalism inevitably leads to linguistic obsolescence. At Ekvn-Yefolecv, our off-grid, climate-positive, intentional Maskoke ecovillage in colonial Alabama, we are returning to an economy that leans toward subsistence without naively believing we could altogether escape capitalism. While we commit to living simply and primarily rely on Traditional Ecological Knowledge, we couple it with low-tech, integrated regenerative systems with origins outside of Maskoke tradition. All newly introduced concepts and technologies are first interrogated through the lens of our language and ethics before agreeing upon their incorporation. We continue to implement both traditional and modern land stewardship practices in adherence to our original Maskoke instructions to embody ecologically regenerative lifeways, which are encapsulated in our language.
Cultural burning.
Researchers who dwell on extracting Indigenous technical ecological knowledge completely miss this vital component that has made possible our successful stewardship since time immemorial. While the world scrambles to find outside solutions to the climate crisis, we cannot afford a collapse of the integral, ecologically augmenting work of Indigenous Peoples worldwide. Indigenous Peoples’ languages, which catalyze intergenerational, climate-positive land stewardship, must be supported and sustained.
Marcus Briggs-Cloud, Ph.D. (Maskoke) is a language revitalizer, scholar, musician, co-founder of Ekvn-Yefolecv, and a Cultural Survival Board Member. He is partnered to Tawna Little (Maskoke) and they have two children, Nokos-Afvnoke and Hemokke, with whom Marcus enjoys speaking exclusively in the Maskoke language.
Top photo: Pose Marilyn Cloud teaching a lesson in the Maskoke language about the Living Building Challenge, the most rigorous green building standard in the world.
