The Potawatomi word for giveaway means they give from the heart

Evidence

I don’t know the origin of the giveaway, but I think that we learned it from watching the plants, especially the berries who offer up their gifts all wrapped in red and blue. We may forget the teacher, but our language remembers: our word for the giveaway, minidewak, means “they give from the heart.” At the word’s center lives the word min. Min is a root word for gift, but it is also the word for berry. In the poetry of our language, might speaking of minidewak remind us to be as the berries? — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 1418

Categorization

• DEFINE: Etymology that collapses ‘gift’ and ‘berry’ into one root — a core definitional example of how language encodes ethic (see ch13 on grammar of animacy).
• SEED: A language-memory essay: how cognates can preserve an environmental ethic long after the practice’s origin is forgotten — usable for the Soundscape/observation thread.
• XREF: connects to: The strawberry grew from Skywoman’s daughter’s heart in Potawatomi creation — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 87; Giving something away can make it grow rather than diminish — , A Year of World Stories, 11790; Gifts create feeling-bonds that commodities do not — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 98

Broader Connections

• Giving something away can make it grow rather than diminish #corroborates (0.72) — , A Year of World Stories, 11790
• Gifts create feeling-bonds that commodities do not #expands (0.72) — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 98