Itki for It and We for HeShe?

PRONOMINAL NEOLOGISMS

Blessed Tu Bishvat. 

That religious feast that connects us 

to the trees  & all  Gaia's mysteries

As part of our Kinship Book Club network <https://www.ptreyesbooks.com/event/kinship-book-club-vol-1>, Western Colorado University professor John Hausdoerffer makes a proposal based upon a question by the Center for Humans and Nature's Gavin Von Horn, "If everything is connected, shouldn't we call everything we?"

This follows on the earlier proposal by Robin Wall Kimmerer to substitute "ki" -- a Potawatomi suffix indicating "of the earth" for the pronoun "it" in order to show  in English that all things are animate -- i.e., basically to do away with the neutral "it."  As a pre-school teacher and director in my early years, I've modified that slightly.  Studying how we learn at U.C. Berkeley night school, I discovered that we learn best, children and adults, when we are taken from the known into the unknown. Not when new words are sprung on us Jack-in-the-Box.  Instead of substitution -- in this transition to a new animate name for a former neuter -- I'm adding the Potawatomi (Bodéwadmi Zheshmowen) suffix  "-ki" to the familiar English pronoun "it." Which has led me to working on a poetry chapbook project I'm calling "Itki"

John's point in this piece below about the water cycle on a mountain demonstrates what this "we" change might look like in English. If everything is truly connected, why not make that fact audible in English by substituting the first person plural pronoun for all third person singular pronouns?

Roxanne Swentzell, Mud Woman Rolls On, 13011