When I was about five years old, I used to watch a bird in the skies of southern Alberta from the
Blackfoot Blood Reserve in northern Montana where I was born.I loved this bird; I would 1 him for
hours. He would 2 effortlessly in that gigantic sky, or he would come down and light on the 3 and
float there beautifully. Sometimes when I watched him, he would not make a sound and liked to move
4 into the grasses. We called him meksikatsi, which in the Blackfoot language 5 "pink-colored feet";
meksikatsi and I became very good friends.
The bird had a very particular significance to me 6 I desperately wanted to be able to fly too. I felt
very much as if I was the kind of person who had been born into a world where 7 was impossible. And
most of the things that I 8 about would not be possible for me but would be possible only for other
people.
When I was ten years old, something unexpected 9 my life suddenly. I found myself become an 10
child in a family I was not born into; I found myself in a 11 position that many native Americans find
themselves in, living in a city that they do not understand at all, not in another culture but 12 two cultures.
A teacher of the English language told me that meksikatsi was not called meksikatsi, even though that is
what 13 people have called that bird for thousands of years. Meksikatsi, he said, was really "duck". I was
very 14 with English. I could not understand it. First of all, the bird did not look like"duck", and when it
made a 15 , it did not sound like "duck", I was even more 16 when I found out that the meaning of the
verb "to duck" came from the bird.
As I 17 to understand English better, I understand that it made a great deal of 18 , but I never forgot
that meksikatsi made a different kind of meaning. I 19 that languages are not just different words for the
same things but totally different 20 , totally different ways of experiencing and looking at the world. |
