Illocutionary Damage
Nikki R. W. Phillips
September 1, 2025
https://orcid.org/0009-0001-4720-5551
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1702185
nikkirphillips@gmail.com
Illocutionary Damage © 2025 by Nikki R. W. Phillips is licensed under CC BY 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Illocutionary violence is not monopolized by those whose ancestors colonized for a living. Moreover, everything attributed to said colonizers is not inherently deficient, any more than it is for those who were colonized. The illocutionary act, as Butler framed it, “The illocutionary speech act performs its deed at the moment of the utterance, and yet to the extent that the moment is ritualized, it is never merely a single moment” it is many (Butler 1997, 3). It, the speech act, is not a single utterance alone. It is the reciprocal utterances that allow for the responsive articulation of the originator’s meaning. All too often, some break the responsive articulation, reframing the unspoken meaning and replacing it rather than creating a dialectical process. Many, including Robin Wall Kimmerer, mistakenly conflate the notion of limitations with language as limitations with the human being who speaks the language. As though humans only have the ideas that others have put in their heads when learning a language. As though the new or unseen is constrained by the words we already use. There is more to reality than the words I know, and unlike Kimmerer’s notion that I am incapable of dreaming and identifying due to my monolingual nature, I have presented an idea that English has no easily findable term for. This does not stop me from being able to conceive of this un-English-named idea. Kimmerer, however, believes, “English doesn’t give us many tools for incorporating respect for animacy. In English, you are either a human or a thing. Our grammar boxes us in by the choice of reducing a nonhuman being to an it, or it must be gendered, inappropriately, as a he or a she. Where are our words for the simple existence of another living thing” (Kimmerer 2013, 56)
Much of the box that Kimmerer sees linguistically within English grammar is of her own making. The idea of the world being animate is not beyond the scope of English illocution. Perhaps a word is missing; however, people are capable of understanding and holding the belief that there is something to name that has animation. Kimmerer presupposes the necessity of the
belief in a separate animating entity that gives life and, therefore, ‘must be respected’—insinuating that this is the only belief that needs to be respected. Negating those who hold different frameworks and epistemological persuasions. Much like Rick Sanchez from Rick And Morty, Kimmerer presupposes existing dialectic limitations within only one language, lionizing the other. Kimmerer’s same essentialism is evident in Rick And Morty season five, episode eight, “Rickternal Friendshine of the Spotless Mort”, when Rick enters his best friend, Bird Person’s, brain to try to locate his mind. As Rick goes through Bird Person’s memories, he eventually finds Bird Person at the core of his brain, filling little bombs with rage. We are not privy to Bird Person’s plans. However, Rick replies to Bird Person’s, “For all your intelligence, you seem to be unable to know where you are wanted,” with “Buddy, this is not a safe way to work on yourself. At this point, I’d support you joining Scientology. I’ll take the workshops with you. I’ll go in a sauna with Travolta, I don’t even care what happens. Let’s get outta here” (Roiland and Harmon 2021, 00:09:16).
There is a round of assumptions in Rick’s statement, much like Kimmerer’s book. Rick’s insistence that Bird Person is ‘working’ on himself, that he, Rick, is the only one who knows how to safely ‘work’ on oneself, and Rick insists with this statement that he is the only one authorized to determine Bird Person’s actions and thoughts. Similarly, Kimmerer assumes the ‘natural’ constraints on English speakers. Within the Rick And Morty scene, Rick casually removes all agency from Bird Person. Assuming, with one statement, that Bird Person is working on himself. The intent is to make things ‘better’ by Rick’s standards. Rick contorts the situation to a rescue. Something that only he, Rick, as the only authority on meaning, controls. The scene does not include the agency of Bird Person. Kimmerer fails to see the plasticity of language, any language. She points to constraints she is projecting outward from herself. The internalized
colonization has yet to dissipate, and the violent restraints it utilizes are reproduced through Kimmerer’s work, brutalizing the Potawatomi language, too. The language deserves to live. To thrive. The language, any language, is plastic, not static. This plasticity means that English speakers are not limited by their grammar. They are limited only to their understanding of their world. Colonial as it may be, there are no limits to one’s understanding unless one recreates the hierarchy that colonialism insists on linguistically and culturally.
When discussing the Anishinaabe word Puhpowee (The force causing mushrooms to push through the earth overnight), Kimmerer states, “In the three syllables of this new word, I could see an entire process of close observation in the damp morning woods, the formulation of a theory for which English has no equivalent” (Kimmerer 2013, 70). Here Kimmerer begins to lower English to place Indigenous language hierarchically above English. However, English is not static as Kimmerer implies. “There was a time when I teetered precariously with an awkward foot in each of two worlds—the scientific and the indigenous. But then I learned to fly. Or at least try. It was the bees that showed me how to move between different flowers—to drink the nectar and gather pollen from both. It is this dance of cross-pollination that can produce a new species of knowledge, a new way of being in the world. After all, there aren’t two worlds; there is just this one good green earth” (Kimmerer 2013, 64). It cannot be cross-pollination because languages are not static.
Bibliography
Butler, Judith. 1997. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge.
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants. Minniapelous: Milkweed.
Roiland, Justin, and Dan Harmon. 2021. "Rickternal Friendshine of the Spotless Mort." Rick And Morty. California: Green Portal Productions, August 8.