Time has melted away. We must have been dancing a long time. The stars are out. It’s time to say goodnight.
Just as one makes their way to the edge of the dance floor (making peace with understanding through this dance enough to rest and merely observe), something indescribable happens.
When one thinks they have a nearly full understanding of a language, the Muse is just and lifts an eyebrow and asks, “Are you sure about that?”
Suddenly, violins and harps change from concluding cadence and finite finale to a roaring encore. Anishinaabemowin pulls one back out onto the dance floor.
Purposefully. Playfully. Profoundly.
The floor, stretching beyond the limits of one’s eyes, falls away. One watches in disbelief — just the language and the dance partner, floating in the dark. Still slowly spinning. Still slowly flowing.
As I look around, the shards and pieces that once allowed us to dance upon them now surround us on all sides, at all perimeters, like the shimmering, sparkling inside of a geode. On all sides, light reflects off each individual piece that surrounds us.
Anyone dancing among this arcane space can see their reflection (and reflections of many other reflections) looking back, to the side, and who knows where else?
Then, something becomes clear and so understandable in this place.
Although the beautiful and elegant root origins of our sounds, words, and expressions are growing in firm and seamless illumination once again, this is only part of the story. As language is carried across generations, time, space, and place, something remarkable happens.
It flows. Courses. In new places where it has been carried, it gives cool shade where the sun is blistering. In new places where it has been planted, it provides warmth where warmth has been absent. How?
Through story. Through description. Through engagement.
This is precisely how one’s personal understanding of a term becomes meaningful and valid, because it reflects how the language coursed towards them before they drew the fresh water. One’s understanding is shaped by experience.
But here, Anishinaabemowin gently tightens its embrace and offers another lesson. There is an important distinction between the validity shaped by personal meaning one discovers in a word and the linguistic origins that word carries.
Though valid, not every interpretation is linguistically correct simply because it is personally meaningful. The language has structure. Grammar. Shared conventions. Understandings protected, practiced, and passed from one generation to another. Community knowledge matters.
The teachings of fluent speakers, true Elders, and those who have carried these sounds across their lives with grace and kindness matter. Personal experience does not erase these foundations. Rather, it dances upon them.
And perhaps this is where another kind of beauty emerges: understanding that the language can hold both shared meaning and individual experience without requiring one to invalidate the other.
Ponder this for a moment.
If one travels to Manitou Rapids, the rhythm and flow of phrases and dialogue spoken mimic the movement of the rapids in the river. If one travels to Onigaming, the steadiness and stability of conversation mimic the lake. If one travels to Lac La Croix, the “sing-song” description of discourse mimics the quick rapids.
These are the rhythms I hear, the impressions carried, and the ways these places have shaped my own experience of the language. They are not universal descriptions of how every person in these communities speaks, nor are they declarations that every interpretation must be equally correct. They are glimpses through one dancer’s eyes.
And what a remarkable thing it is to discover that one can honour the integrity of a language while remaining open to the different ways its beauty is experienced. And among the countless glimmers shimmering in the night around us as we dance, one easily overlooked truth catches the light: There may be as many beautiful and legitimate ways of experiencing a language as there are lives through which it has flowed, but this does not mean its origins are infinitely interchangeable.
The river may reach countless shores, and each may know its waters differently, but not every imagined source is where the river began.
The coursing and flowing of the language impacts every life in a different way as each person threads their life experiences into the images that each sound manifests in one’s mind, from one’s heart, from one’s tongue, and to another’s ears.
During this unforgettable dance, somewhere in extended space, the language makes it clear once again. It is never the way but a way.
Anishinaabemowin then provides another epiphany.
Somewhere between an inexhaustible well and an everlasting jawbreaker, there are layers to each sound. A literal understanding. An implicit meaning. A cultural understanding. A philosophical underpinning. Meaning facing outwards. Meaning facing inwards — the esoterics, entire worlds in themselves, protected and cared for across generations.
This dance. Who is leading now? I don’t think it’s me.
Again, it’s clear: It’s never the way: it’s a way.
The mind-bending and mind-blowing beauty of the origins can inflate the heart, inspire the mind, and nourish the spirit. Although a beautiful glimpse, it is a brief glimpse. There is more beauty in the flickers of blue light within our sounds than can be fully grasped in even a lifetime.
Migration. Evolution. Adaptation. Conceptual drift.
Generations. Shifting perspectives. Variation. Dialect.
Changing needs and changing worlds.
Suddenly, the dance floor has returned, restored from a trillion ideas, concepts, and individual vantage points, memories, legacies, and moments without limit. Maybe this is the legacy and reality of all languages. Imagine to whom, to what, and where the coursing river of the language you speak has gone.
As the sacred strings, like holy harps, begin to slow, what’s left that radiates in richness is this: Slowdancing with Anishinaabemowin conjures both confidence and humility as a learner.
I am grateful for the brief glimpse of the elegant, esoteric origins my mentors and teachers protected and shared with me. At the same time, tonight’s dance revealed the playful grin of the muse, the sacred clown, who teaches that sometimes it’s all about learning more and more about knowing less and less.
Robert Animiiki Horton is an educator, author, orator and linguist. He is a member of Rainy River First Nations.
