A Word for the Importance of Waiting
Iktsuarpok • verb • (ick-t’soo-arr-pock)
Definition: Waiting for someone to show up
Origin: Inuktitut (family of languages of the Inuit peoples)
To help sustain and grow The Word with Barrett Holmes Pitner we have introduced a subscription option to the newsletter. Subscribers will allow us to continue producing The Word, and create exciting new content including podcasts and new newsletters.
Subscriptions start at $5 a month, and if you would like to give more you can sign up as a Founding Member and name your price.
We really enjoy bringing you The Word each week and we thank you for supporting our work.
Pre-orders for Barrett Holmes Pitner’s book THE CRIME WITHOUT A NAME are now available. You can place those orders through your local independent bookseller, or any of the following: Bookshop.org | Amazon.com | Barnes and Noble
At SCL, we define our organization as a cultural think tank but this definition often confuses many people because our ethnocidal society has turned culture into an abstract, incomprehensible idea. In America, culture is often perceived as pertaining exclusively to “cultured” activities, such as the arts, music, and dance, and more and more businesses are discussing the importance of workplace culture. While these activities definitely pertain to culture, they still exist as derivatives of a larger concept of culture.
At SCL, we view culture a bit differently. Culture lives in the things that people create in order to survive in a particular place in perpetuity. Culture includes language, clothing, housing, food, art, dance, and so much more; but most importantly it requires an attachment to place. Your environment shapes your culture, so the stronger your connection to your environment the better you understand your culture.
The impact of colonization and the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Americas means that Americans have attempted to live and create a culture without a strong attachment to the place in which they live. The people with the greatest attachment to place have been killed and marginalized, and colonizers viewed land as an opportunity to make money and not to cultivate culture.
Due to this, people are tasked with attempting to forge a meaningful life without an attachment to place, and as our lives become increasingly meaningless, we then attempt to create culture to fill our profound cultural void.
As we all live within an ethnocidal society built upon the genocide and ethnocide of Indigenous people, we must recognize that we cannot build a sustainable, nurturing culture without appreciating and elevating the culture of Indigenous people.
Many of the words that we share every week have European roots and we use these words not just because many Americans have a greater familiarity with European languages, but also because these languages help us articulate the flaws within our ethnocidal society. By cultivating the language to articulate the problems, we can get closer to finding the language to articulate the solutions. These cultural solutions must have an attachment to place, and this is why Indigenous culture and language are so essential to transcending ethnocide.
This week’s word comes from the Inuit people who have lived in what is now called Canada for thousands of years, and a modern-day understanding of iktsuarpok can give us all an enlightening perspective of the cultural destruction created by ethnocide.
Iktsuarpok & Residential Schools
Iktsuarpok is an Inuit verb meaning “waiting for someone to show up,” and I speculate that the long journeys required to get food in their cold and isolated environment necessitated the creation of this verb.
The environment made it hard to follow someone into the wild and search for them, and likewise lazily relaxing outside and letting the time slip by as you waited was also not an option. Due to this, waiting became an action. Looking out the window, cleaning the house, going outside and gazing at the horizon, and making dinner in anticipation of one’s return, all became actions encompassed by iktsuarpok.
As the team at SCL was talking about iktsuarpok this past week, it was revealed on Thursday that the remains of 215 Indigenous children were discovered buried on the Kamloops Indian Residential School grounds on Secwépemc territory (what is today called British Columbia, Canada). “Waiting for someone to show up,” now had a completely different meaning as it attests to the cultural destruction of ethnocide.
For those unfamiliar with Canada’s residential school system, starting in the 17th century up to the 1990s the program took Indigenous children from their homes and forcefully indoctrinated them with Anglican culture. It existed to strip Indigenous people of their culture and force them to embrace a dominant white culture that would never embrace them. The school consisted of rampant and unregulated abuse as colonizers and eventually the Canadian government physically beat out Indigenous culture and killed children.
An American equivalent of Canada’s residential school system was the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania whose motto was “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.”
The ethos of the Canadian and American iterations defined Indigenous people as subhuman and that western civilization had an obligation to make them civilized by destroying their culture. This is a centuries-long ethnocidal campaign against Indigenous people, and as oppressed people within ethnocide, the ethnocidee knows that our iktsuarpok far too often results in them never returning home.
Ethnocide creates an inhospitable world for the ethnocidee, and now the threats to one’s culture and existence are no longer just the obstacles created by Mother Nature. The threats now include human beings who consider your existence to be a threat to their essence.
When you wait for someone to return home, you know that they will come back because your existence is interwoven with theirs. They are leaving because they must do so in order to sustain your culture, and they will return because that is how your culture and existence can survive for generations.
As ethnocide works to destroy culture, it makes it more difficult for people to return home.
Lost in Translation: Nouns & Verbs
If you choose to research iktsuarpok you will find that some people have translated the word as a noun and not a verb, and this represents a very profound and troubling shift.
Verbs require action, but nouns can be a fixed type of inaction. A noun can merely be a static thing that exists in the world that we neither create nor have much control over. Turning verbs into nouns speaks to a cultural passivity that should not be ignored.
A great example of the problematic scenario that occurs when verbs become nouns would be the word “love.” Love is both a noun and verb. Love is a thing, but you can also love someone. However, if we primarily understand love to be a noun then love becomes a feeling and not actions. This dynamic can result in people feeling love for another person while engaging in unloving actions. The noun usurps the verb, and now the language we use to express a feeling has more importance than how we treat each other.
To address this confusion, many cultures have different words for different types of love, with clear distinctions between love as a verb and as a noun. The Greeks use Agapó as the verb of one type of love.
When iktsuarpok becomes a noun it gets reduced to merely a feeling, and not the actions one undertakes—that include various feelings—as they wait for someone to return. Gazing out a window in anticipation of one’s return is more than a feeling. The longer the wait, the more actions one will undertake and the more feelings that will occur. Viewing iktsuarpok as a verb inclines us to think about the multitude of actions that we all engage in as we wait for someone to return. It makes it easier to empathize with other people because it is easier to paint a picture in your mind. It exists as more than a feeling.
Additionally, when iktsuarpok is applied to an ethnocidal society it becomes easier for all of us to envision the actions and feelings that a person of color must feel when a loved one leaves home in order to survive in an inhospitable world that views their existence as a threat. We can imagine and empathize with the actions and anxiety one feels as they wait for the person to return, and hope their loved one does not have a life-threatening encounter with an ethnocider or law enforcement. Likewise, we can better envision the life altering grief they will have if the person never returns home.
We must remember that we are not passive participants in life, and that waiting for a friend, loved one, family member, and a physical embodiment of your culture is always an action.
Ethnocidal societies have tragically viewed Indigenous life as a threat and believed that the erasure of their culture could provide ethnocide with life. Ethnocide desired to transform land from a life-sustaining cultural foundation into property that could generate wealth, and Indigenous people’s attachment to the land has given them strength and resilience in the face of genocidal and ethnocidal oppression. Sustaining your culture, which includes waiting for someone to return home, is never passive and must always be considered an action.
