More Than Words

When I headed off with a river otter as she went looking for lost human tongues, it helped that I was already heading her way — metaphorically speaking, that is. Increasingly over the past decade, I’ve been stripping the bindings off the history I grew up with. I’ve been absorbing the truth that when my great-great-­grandparents came to what is now southwestern Ontario in the early 1830s, they settled themselves atop an already settled civilization with its own language, customs, and ways of being.

I’ve been learning about that civilization’s creation myths, including the post-flood heroics of a muskrat who dove deep to retrieve a bit of submerged earth, with which to regenerate land on a turtle’s back. I’ve learned that for Anishinaabe like Lindsay Keegitah Borrows, from the Nawash First Nation, humans emerged...