Aacimotaatiiyankwi

Written by Jarrid Baldwin & Hunter Lockwood

aya ceeki! Like many of you, we spent the last weekend at the annual Winter Gathering. And also like many of you, we found ourselves exhausted after days of dancing and stories! So when ciinkwia (Jarrid) was trying to figure out a way to say someone (more specifically, his fiancée, Erica!) is really, REALLY sleepy, and we found this wonderful old word, we knew we had to share it with you.

We knew a lot of words already that have to do with sleepiness, like keetankwaanki ‘he / she is sleepy’! You might know this one too – it’s a perfectly good way of saying it, but ciinkwia wanted something just a little stronger.

We thought of some other words, too, like kahcokaalakiinkweeyani-nko? ‘are your eyes heavy?’ It’s a wonderfully descriptive word (maybe even deserving of its own blog post, explaining why…), but wasn’t exactly what he was looking for.

And then in our searching for sleepy terms we came across a surprising term with the opposite meaning: awiinkomihsiiwa‘he / she is completely awake’ – which would be awiinkomihsiikwi, in our contemporary usage – and we noticed something interesting right away, which sent our little breakfast nook of language nerds into an uproar.

That word is really similar to the myaamia word for ‘moth’, wiinkwa (did you notice it, too?). In fact, that word is what linguists might call a verb of possession, when you take a possessed noun and turn it into a verb! 

We might say that the verb awiinkomihsiikwi literally means ‘she or he does not have the moth’ – because moths are considered a sleep-bringing spirit! So someone who has a major bout of insomnia and just can’t get to sleep could be described as awiinkomihsiikwi – he or she does not have the spirit of sleep.

With the “not” form in our back pocket, that brings us back, at last, to our original goal: if you want to say someone is really, REALLY sleepy, you could say eewiinkomici. 

We hope you appreciate this word as much as we all did. It was great seeing you all at Winter Gathering; I’m sure a lot of us who attended have a little bit of the sleeping spirit with us while we get home and recover from the fun weekend!