Viktoria’s Reviews > Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants > Status Update

The Potawatami language the author is learning doesn't divide the world into masculine & feminine but into animate & inanimate. Forces of nature -- beings, plants, water -- are understood to be respected selves, not things. Now I'm thinking of how I've gradually adopted feminine pronouns for (lifeless) objects. (It's a quirk adapted from too much queer YouTube.) It seems to raise the things' status somehow.

"How, in our modern world, can we find our way to understand the earth as a gift again, to make our relations with the world sacred again?"