In Potawatomi, not only humans, animals and trees are alive, but so too are mountains, boulders, winds and fire. Stories, songs and rhythms are all also animate, they are, they be. Potawatomi is a language abundant with verbs: 70 per cent of its words are verbs, compared to 30 per cent in English. Wiikwegamaa, for instance, means ‘to be a bay’. ‘A bay is a noun only if water is dead,’ writes Kimmerer:
