From Awakening The Horse People:
Our language is like a pearl inside a shell. The shell is like the people that carry the language. If our language is taken away, then that would be like a pearl that is gone. We would be like an empty oyster shell.
Yurranydjil Dhurrkay, Galiwin’ku, North East Arnhem Land
The understanding shared in the quote above spells trouble for spiritual seeking settlers, neo-pagans, and those pursuing ancestral recovery work.
Indigenous knowledge about the living power and presence of Indigenous languages creates visible boundaries that give us insight into what we have lost as individuals from a people, from a place – and how modern equivocating of spiritual practices or cultural re-imagining based in english are missing an integral component to their wholeness, connection, and honesty.
This is a provocative understanding to take in. If deeply considered, it will raise unsettling questions about what we think and say we may be doing within a cultural or spiritual pathway like neopaganism or ancestral recovery if recovering Indigenous language and its ways of thinking and being is not a part.
To prevent likely evasions away from this understanding, a whole series of related quotes are shared below from Indigenous elders, activists, and teachers from different nations around the world. Please read and consider all of them.
