by Mark Vardy

This post is about nature and language. It provides the rationale and background for interviews conducted with KPU students who speak English as an additional language. The students discussed how they name climate change and sustainable development in their home languages. The interviews can be found on KPU’s Green Justice podcast – Polyphonic Voices Part 1 and Polyphonic Voices Part 2.

Humans are embedded within nature in a multitude of ways that become clear through the careful exploration of diverse languages. This is true for all aspects of the human-nature relationship, including the specific case of climate change. And for people like me whose first language is English, climate change can be contextualized, expanded and grounded as an issue of social justice through a discussion of the non-English words used to name it. Let me illustrate what I’m talking about through an example from Arctic Canada.

Lost in Translation

Many of the terms associated with discussions of climate change, including “resilience”, “adaptation” and “climate change” itself, have been translated from English into Inuktitut – the language spoken by 90% of Inuit in Nunavut – in ways that minimize or exclude anthropogenic causes.  According to this article written in 2015 by Emilie Cameron, Rebecca Mearns and Janet Tamalik McGrath, the Inuktitut words chosen to represent climate change frame it as a biophysical phenomenon, one which is not influenced by humans. Translations that filter out the human causes of anthropogenic climate change can render the issue politically inert. Instead of critically examining how powerful political and financial elites continue to profit from burning fossil fuels, climate change gets framed as the adaptation to biophysical events that are beyond anyone’s control. But other options are available.

Mearns and McGrath are Inuit and have extensive experience working with Inuktitut as translators and teachers. Cameron is a human geographer. They have a lengthy and fascinating discussion of the subtle and nuanced, but deeply impactful, differences between Inuktitut terms and their contextual meanings. They write about how Inuktitut reflects the Inuit cosmology of a universe that is continually changing and in flux, and how climate change is often translated into Inuktitut using words that connote further change, which reflects the cosmology of the English speaking world more so than the Inuktitut. That is, English tends to portray nature as a fixed or stable entity, which is now being altered by humans through climate change. Instead of emphasizing change, however, Cameron, Mearns and McGrath argue that it makes more sense to use Inuktitut words that connote harm, and that are understood in the context of responsibility and justice. This latter framing would deemphasize change, but make it clear that humans are harming nature.

“Instead of emphasizing change, it makes more sense to use Inuktitut words that connote harm, and that are understood in the context of responsibility and justice.”

This power of words to frame human relations with nature in different ways is eloquently expressed by Robin Wall Kimmerer (2017). Kimmerer is a member of the Potawatomi Nation, a biology professor, and author of numerous books, including Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. The Potawatomi spoken by her grandfather has a radically different way of relating to nature than English. Whereas the grammar and vocabulary of English tends to position humans outside of nature, Potawatomi makes it clear that humans are part of nature and exist in mutual relation with it. For example, Potawatomi has many more verbs than English to express all of the different ways that plants, animals and other natural phenomena come into being. Potawatomi also distinguishes between animate and inanimate objects, so a different word is used to hear a blue jay than hear an airplane. As Kimmerer says, “There is no it for nature. Living beings are referred to as subjects, never as objects, and personhood is extended to all who breathe and some who don’t.” Yet Potawatomi, like all of the many hundreds of Indigenous languages spoken in Turtle Island before the arrival of Europeans, was outlawed. In what is now known as Canada, children were apprehended, forced into residential schools and forbidden to speak their languages by settlers. This intentional erasure of Indigenous cosmologies was accompanied by the imposition, cemented through the English language, that nature is a “natural resource” to be exploited.

“There is no it for nature. Living beings are referred to as subjects, never as objects, and personhood is extended to all who breathe and some who don’t.” – Robin Wall Kimmerer

Whereas Potawatomi is spoken in the plains south of the Great Lakes including in what is now Oklahoma, Inuktitut is spoken across the Canadian Arctic. Each language speaks its own unique environment and gives life to cosmologies that are intertwined with nature in ways that are specific to place. As anthropologist Wade Davis says, “A language, of course, is not just a set of grammatical rules or a vocabulary; it’s a flash of the human spirit, the vehicle by which the soul of a particular culture comes into the material world” (2019). From the many hundreds of unique languages spoken by the original inhabitants of this land, there are now about 60 Indigenous languages spoken in Canada with three – Inuktitut, Cree and Ojibwa – thriving. As Davis argues, we should take care to ensure all of Indigenous languages thrive because when languages go dormant or extinct, entire cosmologies are lost. This need to pay attention to how the human relation to nature is understood in languages other than English is intensified by climate change.

(Photo: Lee Beavington)

The Importance of Listening

As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) makes clear by sifting through and assessing thousands of peer-reviewed articles written by natural and social scientists, the groups of people who suffer the most from adverse effects of climate change are those who are already marginalized by social, cultural, economic and political forces (IPCC, 2022). This marginalization and oppression, which is compounded by changing climatic conditions, occurs both within and between nation-states, with so-called developing nations suffering inequalities that are rooted in 500 years of European imperialism, exploitation and colonialism. The IPCC notes that “high [rates of] vulnerability [to climatic hazards] are influenced by historical and ongoing patterns of inequity such as colonialism, especially for many Indigenous Peoples and local communities” (p. 12). It is not only the Indigenous languages spoken in Canada that we should be paying attention to, but also languages spoken around the world.

The multitude of ways that humans and nature are intertwined can be explored and opened up through the languages other than English. Fortunately, we at KPU have an abundance of ways to engage in this discussion. Over half of the students at KPU, whether they are registered as domestic or international students, speak languages other than English. More precisely, 57% of domestic students and 87% of international students hold conversations in languages other than English (KPU, 2024, p. 5). And, according to data collected in 2021, there are 86 different languages spoken by KPU students (KPU, 2021). What cosmologies and what human-nature relations are opened up in these languages?

How Do Our Students Name Climate Change?

This is the question that I and two of my colleagues in Criminology, Paula Hirschmann and Greg Simmons, plan to explore by asking students over coffee and snacks to contribute to the Green Justice podcast that we host. That is, we will be asking students who speak English as an additional language how they name climate change and sustainable development in their home languages, and we will be considering how those words frame the relationship between humans and nature. Listen to our podcast, for the results!