Relearning the languages of land, plants, and place, ft. Martín Prechtel
How do we revitalize "real culture"?
One of the biggest “lightbulb” moments I’ve had in the last years of hosting Green Dreamer has been learning about “biocultural diversity” — a more holistic, rooted concept than “biodiversity.”
Terralingua shares, “For millennia… people have adapted to their local environment while drawing material and spiritual sustenance from it. Through this mutual adaptation, human communities have developed thousands of different cultures and languages: distinctive ways of seeing, knowing, doing, and speaking that have been shaped by the interactions between people and the natural world.”
Biocultural diversity speaks to healing the conceptual divide between nature and culture — reminding us that Indigenous and local languages and ways of being, knowing, and living emerge from place. So it is not a coincidence that language loss and cultural diversity loss are occurring alongside biodiversity loss — they are deeply entangled, and being unraveled, as the whole “web of life.”
This remembrance speaks deeply to me. So I was excited to get to dive deeper into these connections in my latest interview with Martín Prechtel, an award-winning writer, artist, and teacher who, “through his work both written and spoken, hopes to promote the subtlety, irony, and premodern vitality hidden in any living language.”
This is one of the highlights from our conversation that I know I will be returning to again and again:
“You've got to realize that the colonists also started Indigenously. Colonization is not Indigenous, necessarily, but… the people you call colonial, which are our quote ‘enemy,’ it would be so great to just have an enemy, you know, we can just go get them but it doesn’t work like that.
The so-called colonials who stop you from speaking the language was at some point stopped from speaking their language too.
It's like English — a very interesting language. It never existed as an Indigenous language. They talk about old English… It's a German language. And then it gets combined with a little bit of Celtic and a whole lot of Latin…
English came about as a language of colonization. In other words, it started as a colonial language. All of the people who were forced to speak it had Indigenous languages and were forced underground with it.
The biggest problem with losing who you are to the colonial conundrum is that you end up promoting exactly the thing that overran your ancestors.
You start trying to legitimize yourself to your enemy. Once you start having to legitimize yourself to your enemy in the conditions that [they] put out, you've already been ‘eaten alive’ …
That's where the point of grief comes in. Because you've got to figure out where this capacity to be an Indigenous person comes from.
It doesn't come from a manual. It doesn't come from a book. And it's not a certain style. It comes from the natural world. It comes from the actual living, spiritual being of all the different things that are in the world…”
When I asked for clarity on whether “Indigenous language” refers to a language with a rooted relationship with place, or being the language of a land, Martín tells me that it is more than about the land — but also about what came before and what makes up the land, including the plants and living community.
So what of the Indigenous languages — reflecting an embodied knowing and mycelial connection to place — that have been lost due to colonization and other disruptive forces?
“The recognition of something so deep and magical having been compromised does not mean that deep and magical things have disappeared. It just means its relation with you has disappeared…
Anton Treuer… said, ‘We didn't lose our languages. The languages lost us.’
The languages are there, but where are we?"
As Martín says these last lines, I instinctively close my eyes and nod along. I can sense the message reverberating into my soul, and I feel goosebumps rising all over my body like a cellular standing ovation.
What will it take for us to re-member and re-learn the languages of land, plants, and place?
If these questions speak to you, I invite you to join me and Martín in this enriching conversation (Green Dreamer EP443) as we explore the contentious politics, practice, and (re)embodiment of Indigeneity, and what it means to become culturally indigestible for the “monster of modernity” and its sterilizing stomach acids ~
A special bonus is that Martín provided music from his own band as the intermission song feature of the episode!
(You can listen to this conversation here or via Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or any podcast app, and view our transcript and episode resources here.)
About the guest
Having grown up with a Pueblo Indian upbringing and later becoming a full member of the Tzutujil Mayan community in the village of Santiago Atitlán, Guatemala, Martín Pretchel draws on his deeply embodied experiences of various Indigenous languages to invite us to unravel the meaning of regrowing “real culture.” Prechtel speaks to us from Northern New Mexico where he once again resides with his family and their Native Mesta horses while teaching at his international school, Bolad’s Kitchen.
Invitations into reflection:
What are the languages with the deepest roots to the land, plants, and place where you currently call home? What is your relationship to these languages?
How might this conversation inspire you to look at “culture” differently?
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