David Egan Philosophy

Catching the 7:30am sunrise meant getting to the trailhead by six in the morning. This is bear country and large animals tend to be more active at times when fewer humans are about. I set out in the dark armed with a headlamp, bear spray, and two phrases in the Nuu-chah-nulth language. The first, wiikšahik (roughly “week-sha-hik”), means “how are you?” and functions as “hello.” The second, ɬakšiʔats (roughly “tlak-shee-ats”), means “I am sorry.”

The bear spray was a defensive weapon, something to use if I got into real trouble with a bear. The two phrases of Nuu-chah-nulth were diplomatic tools, to be used to avoid getting into trouble in the first place. When I was living in Sitka in southeast Alaksa, a Tlingit culture bearer explained that you have to address the bears in the local indigenous language because they haven’t learned the colonizer’s language. This failure of communication explains why human–bear relations have been so testy in the centuries since colonization. One elder, whenever he stepped out into the forest, would offer an apology to the bears: “Forgive me, grandfather, for trespassing on your land.”

These rituals risk seeming a bit quaint from a modern Western point of view. There’s no hard evidence that bears understand any human language, whether Indo-European, Na-Dene, or Wakashan. But I think we misunderstand the purpose of addressing bears in Tlingit or Nuu-chah-nulth if we turn it into a hypothesis about ursine linguistic capabilities (fortunately I didn’t encounter any bears on my morning hike so I didn’t get to test the hypothesis in any case). It’s not an isolated conjecture but an integral part of an interconnected set of culturally specific practices. These practices, taken as a whole, have served northwest coast indigenous people well for thousands of years.

In his book, Tsawalk: A Nuu-chah-nulth Worldview, Umeek (E. Richard Atleo) tells a story about the origins of biodiversity. In the mythic past, humans and other animals were all one people. A prophecy had foretold that someone was coming who would transform them into different creatures. They didn’t want to be transformed in this way and so they armed themselves to prepare against this enemy. Raccoon made a club and Deer fashioned a pair of knives from seashells.

They didn’t realize this transformer was already among them. The hero and mischief maker Aint-tin-mit circulated among the people, flattering each in turn so that they would show him their weapons. He stuck Raccoon’s club to his rear, turning it into a tail, and fixed Deer’s knives to his head, turning them into antlers. Each animal was transformed into the shape it has today with a sharp slap to the backside.

Compare this story to the story of Babel from the eleventh chapter of Genesis. That story tells the origin of linguistic diversity. Previously, all people spoke the same language. Fearing that God would scatter them, they resolve to build a city and a tower that reach to heaven. But before they can complete this project, God does indeed scatter them and baffles their language so that they can no longer understand one another.

The Babel story has long fascinated me and I discussed it in some detail in the first few pages of my book on Wittgenstein and Heidegger. Among other things, the story marks the entry of politics into the Hebrew Bible. Up to that point, we follow the history of humankind as a whole: the original family of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, and the later contraction of the human family to the inhabitants of Noah’s ark during the Flood. After the story of Babel, the narrative focuses in on a single family: that of Abraham. Abraham and his descendants are constantly enmeshed in negotiating their place among their neighbours, which are often much more powerful nations.

Likewise, the story of Aint-tin-mit recounts the origins of politics. By separating a unified people into different animal communities, he creates the need for these communities to negotiate with one another over their respective interests. One obvious difference between the two stories is that the Babel story of fractured unity concerns only distinct human communities whereas the Nuu-chah-nulth story concerns both human and animal communities.

That difference is momentous. In the philosophical traditions of Europe and the Middle East, animals stand outside the political order. They are property or sometimes enemies—Aristotle likens the relation between humans and wild animals to warfare—but they aren’t political actors.

By contrast, in the Nuu-chah-nulth tradition, and in many others of the northwest coast, the “bear people,” the “salmon people,” the “deer people,” and others are regarded as sovereign nations that the “human people” must negotiate with according to strictly defined protocols. By establishing the correct protocols, the salmon people agree to provide sustenance to the human people on the understanding that the human people will in turn take care not to overfish the waters and maintain the waterways to ensure the flourishing of future generations of salmon.

What this looks like in practice fits what a university-trained ecologist might describe as prudent wildlife management. But the theory that informs the practice—the stuff that tends to go by the name of philosophy—is importantly different. The word “management” has top-down connotations and, in that respect, the Nuu-chah-nulth don’t see themselves as “managing” anything. They see themselves as equal partners engaging in mutually beneficial exchange. (For more on management, see item 3 in the list at the end of this newsletter.)

This difference in theory informs a different kind of attention to the natural world. If your relationship with salmon is understood in terms of negotiation with a sovereign people, you don’t just pay close attention to salmon stocks and salmon behaviour as a careful observer. You attend to what the salmon want to communicate to you. A university-trained ecologist learns to look carefully at the world. A Nuu-chah-nulth ecologist learns to attend carefully to how the world looks back.

Underlying the practice of addressing the bears when you enter their domain is the basic Nuu-chah-nulth principle of heshook ish tsawalk—everything is one. According to Nuu-chah-nulth origin stories, humans share a common origin with other animals and the principle of unity that binds the collective community of living beings is stronger than the diversity that distinguishes them. Talking to bears in Nuu-chah-nulth, then, isn’t based on a speculation about what languages bears do or don’t understand. It’s more like an acknowledgment of kinship with the bear people, and an expression of respect.

I’ve suggested that what might look like a quaint custom—addressing bears in the Nuu-chah-nulth language—makes more sense when you see it as part of a broader way of life that involves treating animals with respect and as equals. Talking the talk only makes sense as one small part of walking the walk. So then what about me, whose total knowledge of the Nuu-chah-nulth language barely extends beyond what I’ve written in this newsletter?

Learning about local indigenous traditions is also an expression of respect for and acknowledgment of a sovereign nation. But talking that talk is only so much verbiage if I don’t also learn to walk the walk—to incorporate that respect and acknowledgment into my way of life. So far, I can only claim to have made baby steps. 

1. The world has passed “peak child”: the number of children under five in the world peaked in about 2017 and is now at a plateau that will start steadily declining. (source)
2. John, Duke of Bavaria (1374–1425), was allegedly murdered with a poisoned book. The pages of a holy book were laced with poison and he, in his religious devotion, kissed the pages, poisoning himself. (source)
3. The word “management” originally derives from horse-breeding. Breeding and training horses was hugely important in Europe and so other practices we now associate with management borrowed the word from horse management. (source)
4. The US Department of Defense makes about $100 million each year from slot machines that they ever so thoughtfully provide to soldiers in overseas bases. (source)
5. Police in Mexico have started using mobile payment terminals to facilitate the taking of bribes. (source)
6. According to a measure of philanthropy that takes into account not just charitable donations but also volunteering and helping strangers, the most generous country in the world is Indonesia. The next nine, in order, are Kenya, the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Myanmar, Sierra Leone, Canada, Zambia, and Ukraine. This data comes from 2022. (source)
7. There have only been blue-eyed humans for about the last 6000–10,000 years, and we all share a common ancestor whose genetic mutation is responsible for the blue-eyed gene. (source)
8. The serial-position effect is a tendency people have to better remember things at the beginning and ending of a sequence than what’s in the middle (one reason for sandwiching criticism between slices of praise). For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, large language models (LLMs) also have a tendency to retrieve information more effectively when it’s toward the beginning or end of a sequence. (source)
9. Cynical people tend to be perceived as more intelligent but the opposite is true—cynical people tend to perform less well on a range of cognitive and academic tests. (source)
10. Mammary glands are modified sweat glands. In effect, mothers “sweat” milk from their nipples. (source)
11. The dishwasher was invented in the late nineteenth century by an American widow, Josephine Cochran, who got fed up with washing the dishes herself. “If nobody else is going to invent a dishwashing machine,” she said, “I’ll do it myself.” (source)
12. If all the data generated in the last year we stored on DVDs and those DVDs were stacked on top of each other, they would form a tower that reached more than halfway to Mars. (source)

(Items 4 and 5 are two of 52 items you can find from this wonderful annual list, which was one of the initial inspirations for me to start keeping a similar record.)