NAFPS Forum

Aaniin!
Aaniin is our word for “hello” in Anishinaabemowin. It literally means I see the light in you. And I see many lights today. So much that it is Sâgassige gisiss—the sun has come out of the clouds.

I’m Anishinaabe, “Nish” for short, and my family are from two nations, Bay Mills Nation and Garden River First Nation, along with many, many relatives––Saulteaux on the Canadian side, and all sorts. Once you proliferate, you proliferate. You move and relocate a lot.

Unlike adrienne, I cannot tell you that I grew up on Star Trek—because I lived in the woods. And by woods, I mean we lived in very simple ways. We had no plumbing; we had lots of candles, lots of fires. We lived very, very differently. At the time, I didn’t know that. My dad taught me to create the wiigwaas from birchbark, which is sacred to us. You can create birchbark canoes that really don’t leak. And when you develop that kind of talent or skill as an Indigenous person, it’s something that you want to pass down. Many of our relatives could work it out with a basket, but my dad could work it out with a canoe, only from birch material. We had no TV or theaters or anything where I could become connected to any concept of Star Trek.

So naturally, when I went out to school at UC Riverside, I was absolutely fascinated by all things popular culture because I’d had no background in it whatsoever. And people still to this day will throw out things and I’ll have this horrible “waaah, take notes, I don’t know” feeling. I didn’t know about The Beatles, Elvis Presley—all the things that people think are just a part of your DNA. Our DNA was quite different.

I grew up in what was a pacifist anarchist community and it was the reason why I was very attracted to the novel The Dispossessed. It was native-founded and then we invited others in, because, as Anishinaabe people, that is our thinking. Simon Ortiz, who was Acomo Pueblo, talks about the word for “people” in his language as hanoh. But when he describes it, he makes it very clear that hanoh is not just for his nation. They’re very cognizant of self-recognition and being a nation, but hanoh is extended as a personal hanoh of your community to the hanoh globally of the world. We do that, too, but we use water.

When we greet others and go other places, we talk in our language about the waters: our wetlands with the rice, our mountains, but always the waterway. We’re always figuring out the waterway. And when I go anywhere––this has become a habit of mine––I’m always checking out the waterways to whatever place we’re headed to. It makes sense, then, that even though I’m a professor in Indigenous Nations Studies, I do not just do “scholactivist” projects, but also actual forms of activism for water protectors. Because water protectors are needed not only at Standing Rock but at many, many other places as well.

When I was a child, I spoke as much Finnish as I could capture from the pacifist-anarchist community where my father, mother, six brothers and sisters and I attended open meetings to debate scripture and the latest news out of Suomen Kommunistinen Puolue, and as much Anishinaabemowen as I could gather from my grandfather, an Ojibwe who cooked for the lumberjack camps during timber harvest and who vexed my parents whenever we visited by fishing Eskimo Pies from a glossy white fridge that had a bullet hole straight through its door. But mostly I spoke the lingua franca of the Cold War era; nin jaganashim, in other words. This all happened in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (which is not really Michigan) and not so long ago, though the U.P., back then anyway, must have slipped time in an effort to remain quiet and feral, while electric metropoles like Cheybogan, Peshtigo, Petosky, and others tempted us to cross borders. But we never did. Civilization might as well have been 65 million miles away.