Aaniin ezhi-ayaayan? Niin Zhakz nindizhinikaaz.

You have no idea what’s writ­ten unless you’re one of a very select group of peo­ple. It’s not a secret or dirty lan­guage, and you shouldn’t feel guilty for not know­ing what it says. No one has ever taught you the mean­ings of these words, and you’ve prob­a­bly never heard or read them before. I sim­ply said “How are you? My name is Jax” in Ojibwe.

You’ve never learned these words because as you’re prov­ing right at this very moment, you speak English. The past decade has been show­ered in heated debate between non-English speak­ing and English speak­ing peo­ple in America.

Frequently, sto­ries about stu­dents who can’t speak English appear in the news and spark con­tro­versy. Phonelines offer a Spanish option, and you’ve no doubt wit­nessed in almost all stores the signs in both English and Spanish. Because of our prox­im­ity to Canada, we Michiganders have French trans­la­tions as well. The most notable retal­i­a­tion to this cir­cum­stance is the hol­ler­ing of “This is America! Speak English!”

The prob­lem I have with this sen­ti­ment is that it is America and we do speak English. English comes from the moth­er­land of England–not America. America has and always will be the prover­bial “melt­ing pot,” as so many peo­ple like to label it. It is absolutely intol­er­ant to think English should be the only way and the only lan­guage in America. English speak­ing per­sons weren’t here first. The Dutch were, fol­lowed by the Spanish and the French. Before all of those peo­ple decided to plop their Galleons down on our shores, the Natives were estab­lished here for thou­sands of years.

To this day, there is no “offi­cial lan­guage” of America. It varies from state to state and region to region. Louisiana offers French and English and New Mexico offers Spanish and English as their lan­guages of state.

The argu­ment about Spanish not being an American lan­guage is brought to a halt here: New Mexico. Ponder it for a moment. We have a state named after another coun­try that speaks Spanish. Now, pull out your American map and count how many states have Native American names and Spanish names. Only five states have true “English” names. Arizona, the fron­trun­ner for immi­gra­tion bug­gery and gen­eral hatred of its indige­nous peo­ple, is an abbre­vi­a­tion of a Spanish term.

The very name­sake of our coun­try is America Vespucci, which as I’m sure you can see is not a very English name. Michigan is a rough trans­la­tion from Algonquin mean­ing “Big Sea Gate.” Look around you, the rivers, the towns you live in; how much of it is actu­ally in English to begin with?

We can take a les­son away from all of this: We’re not an English speak­ing coun­try and we never have been.

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