The Importance of Sentience

Kimura: The more I perceive this world as expressions of sentience, the more belonging there is. In English, we never refer to a member of our family or indeed to any person as it. It robs a person of selfhood and kinship, reduces a person to a mere thing. So it is that in most Indigenous languages, we use the same words to address the living world as we do for our family because they are our family. And I used the word someone just to get closer into the realness. There's a being in there, a beingness."