Early Indigenous Literatures

SN-P2

Just as the watery language of “The Red Man’s Greeting” asserts recurrence and transformation along a temporal axis, these terms highlight Pokagon’s understanding of water as place making, the second feature “critical relationality.” In an effort to reposition the status of watery formations as locations unto themselves, Yazzie and Baldy assert “a worldview [that] is ‘water view’ a view from the river not a view of the river” (2). This firmly repositions water as the space from which one considers the world, as a site of inhabitance, rather than a distant object or entity to be studied. 


Specifically, “rivers, lakes, and wetlands were crucial to Potawatomi food systems and medicines, while also providing their primary mode of transportation via canoes” (Pochedley). Potawatomi peoples not only understand the ecological boundaries and contours of waterways in this space, but they also know these spaces for their medicinal attributes and transportation potential. Water is an actor and signifier in the story about how Potawatomi peoples came to inhabit the Great Lakes region and understand it as their home. They “knew that they had arrived home in the Great Lakes region once they reached the place where food grows on water” in reference to mnomen, “a critical spiritual relative and food source of the Neshnabé” which translates in English to wild rice (Pochedley). Mnomen not only ontologically signifies the Great Lakes region as the homeland for the Neshnabé peoples and their descendants, but it also asserts a level of knowledge about the Great Lakes region as a place that provides this sustenance. Finally, mnomen is a “critical spiritual relative” that cannot be detangled from place, and as a spiritual relative, there is an imperative of care and consideration.

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