A bay is a noun only if water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikwegamaa—to be a bay—releases the water from bondage and lets it live. “To be a bay” holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers. Because it could do otherwise—become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall, and there are verbs for that, too. To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive. Water, land, and even a day, the language a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses through all things, through pines and nuthatches and mushrooms. This is the language I hear in the woods; this is the language that lets us speak of what wells up all around us.[…]
This is the grammar of animacy.
A landscapeemerges out of a set of ongoing processes, which Ingold refers to as a “taskscape.” This is the part that often trips IAs up: We try to design structures instead of the distributed processes that would create those structures.
Tim Ingold coined the term, “taskscape” in his 1993 paper, “The Temporality of the Landscape.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer explores a related idea in Braiding Sweetgrass as she processes her frustration that everything in the indigenous language she’s learning is a verb. How can “a bay” be a verb instead of a noun? It’s a language that thinks of the world as taskscape, a set of interrelated activities from which a world emerges, instead of a completed state.