How to become an indigenous, activity, place-based thinker able to understand larger problems in the cluttered world of today.
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Sunwise or antisunwise, that is the question.
Deiseil or Widdershins? With the sun or against it? I have a great love for archaic and older words, because they tend to be more descriptive than the tripe we see most of the time. I had read the word widdershins in a murder mystery some time in the past, and found that it meant dancing in an anti-sunwise direction. I thought to myself, “There has to be another old word to describe the opposite. Hmmm.” I looked in my old dictionary from my parents’ house; you know the type, about 8 by 10 by about a foot thick? My mom purchased it because it was the first on she had found with the word “antidisestablishmentarianism.” My three siblings and I had to learn to spell this word because some girl had won a spelling bee on television with it at some point. In this monster of a dictionary it said under widdershins, see also deiseil. These words are of meaning to me because at our war dance celebration in July, and all other pow-wows, we (Salish, Kootenai, Pend d’Oreille people) dance deiseil. Our neighbors across the mountains, the Blackfeet, dance widdershins. As you may have been able to deduce, sunwise and anti-sunwise also mean clockwise and counterclockwise. Other terms might include sinistra and destra. More familiar than that might be dextrous, or ambidextrous, meaning right-handed or either handed, but both with the root right handed, and sinister, meaning left handed and also evil. Do we really think anymore that left-handed people are sinister, and evil, or is it just an arbitrary trait we have specifically bred for?
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