Written by: Dr. Haley Shea and Dr. Hunter Thompson Lockwood
Hunter and I (Haley) teamed up to do some work examining emotions as they show up in the language records to try to better understand how Myaamiaki ‘Myaamia people’ historically thought about the emotional experience.
As a psychologist, I have so many thoughts on emotions and am excited by this project. As we explored the records, we noticed that more complicated emotions use metaphors to embody, express, and explain the feeling. This makes sense; as mentioned in this previous Myaamia metaphor blog post, metaphors are a tool that Myaamiaki can use to understand and describe complex concepts or ideas – like emotions.
My field (psychology) likes to differentiate between experiences that are “normal” and those that are “pathological.” I personally don’t love this dichotomy because everyone is different, and many emotions are normal reactions to abnormal situations. What I find helpful instead is considering how these emotions or experiences can interfere with our life and trying to mitigate their impact on what’s most important to us (like work or relationships).
As a therapist, I do believe that we have to be able to understand and express our emotions to live with them and make space for them in our lives. If we have an emotion that is so complicated and difficult to put into words that it impacts our ability to live properly, then perhaps metaphoric expression can help us get there.
This blog post will explore three emotions in particular, starting with the psychological side of the emotion, followed by an exploration of how they show up metaphorically within our language records, and ending with an interpretation of that metaphor.
Shock
Shock is an intense emotional response that we experience when something unexpected or overwhelming happens. It is often thought of as part of the fight or flight response, which is the body’s automatic reaction to a perceived threat. Our body physically prepares to react – our heart rate goes up, our breathing quickens, blood is sent to the muscles, and nonessential functions (like digestion) slow down to conserve energy.
When we feel shock, all of these things happen, and we often “freeze” because we are struggling to understand or process what is happening. Mentally, people who experience shock feel confused, like time is slowing down. This theoretically signals that we need to try to comprehend this unexpected change. Again, it is an incredibly complicated emotion similar to grief because we can feel many other things at the same time; some people feel numbness, sadness, fear, or anger. This might also be a precursor to grief (the next emotion).
While exploring the records, we discovered one particularly interesting metaphor that myaamiaki people used to express shock: SHOCK IS BLOOD CLOTTING.
eetoowiteehiaani ‘I am shocked’ (literally ‘I have a blood clot in my heart’)
Much like shock is the body’s response to a perceived threat, a blood clot is the body’s response to a physical injury. When functioning normally, blood clots keep our bodies safe from external threats and help us heal – but in the wrong place or time, clotted blood can cause harm or even death. Knowing this, we were amazed (if not totally shocked!) to find that Myaamiaki had made a metaphorical connection between shock and clotted blood, and encoded it in the language:
atoow– ‘a blood clot’ + -iteehee ‘heart; think, feel’ = atoowiteehee– ‘be shocked’
Decades of research on Myaamiaataweenki ‘Myaamia language’ uncovered many metaphors, including the others we discuss in this post. However, this particular metaphor was something that nobody at the Myaamia Center had ever seen before.
Grief
Grief – talk about one of the more difficult, but also more common experiences humans have! The most commonly thought of situation that evokes grief is the death of someone in our lives. However, grief can also come from other “losses” we experience, even if death isn’t involved.
For example, we might feel grief when we lose a job, move to a new home, or have a falling out with a friend or family member. It is often experienced as coming in waves or varying in intensity and is often triggered by random things in our environment. It’s a pretty complicated emotion because it often exists alongside other emotions; we will feel grief alongside relief, sadness, regret, or even happiness. Grief tends to make it harder to focus, make decisions, or understand the world around us.
For Myaamiaki and many other Indigenous peoples, grief is familiar. On a collective level, histories of oppression and assimilation have led to numerous losses. More specifically, we experienced literal and metaphorical losses during removal, boarding schools, and other periods of significant assimilationist policies. We have experienced a loss of lives, language, culture, and place across hundreds of years. This is called collective grief; the experience of major losses as a collective group. This is often discussed in the context of historical trauma, but grief is a really helpful way to consider these historical events and the ripple effects that still touch us to this day.
Speakers of Myaamiaataweenki used many different metaphors to express this complex emotion. Some of those metaphors, like “GRIEF IS A HEART INJURY”, are familiar to speakers of English and many other languages.
šaakwiteehiaani ‘I am grieving, heartbroken’ (literally ‘My heart is crushed’)
This is a metaphor that our language and culture researchers have known about for a long time; in fact, it is already present in the dictionary:
šaakw– ‘crush’ + -iteehee ‘heart; think, feel’ = šaakwiteehee– ‘be grieving, heartbroken’
Psychologists have known for a long time that people experience social rejection and grief using the same systems and circuits that the body uses when we experience physical pain. Unlike the SHOCK IS BLOOD CLOTTING metaphor, this might be a totally universal part of all human languages – metaphors comparing grief to an injured heart appear in Bible verses, Shakespeare’s plays, and many other sources across time.
What’s unique in Myaamiaataweenki is the use of a smaller piece of a word that means ‘crush’ to express the kind of intense, destructive pressure associated with the grieving process.
Anger
The next emotion associated with metaphors in the myaamia language records is anger. Generally, anger is thought of as an emotion that is a result of something interfering – either physically or mentally – with some desired outcome.
For example, when babies can’t get to something they want (a toy, food, etc.), they get frustrated and/or angry (and cry). But to me, anger is such an interesting emotion for a few reasons.
First, theories of emotions suggest that positive emotions communicate that we approach the thing that caused that emotion, and negative emotions tell us to avoid the cause.
This works for most emotions, but anger typically violates this. It is considered a “negative” emotion (though I don’t love that judgment label nor the dichotomy of emotions), but most often has us approach the cause with aggression and sometimes even violence.
Second, anger is almost always a secondary or reactive emotion. Typically, we experience anger as a response to another emotion, like fear or betrayal. There are situations in which anger is our primary emotion (when we are threatened, for example), but this is a less common expression of the emotion (Harmon-Jones et al., 2013).
Finally, anger is such an embodied emotion, meaning we have a distinct physical experience of the emotion. This is the case for a lot of emotions, but anger in particular can raise our body temperature, heart rate, and blood pressure, and turn our face red. Its complexity lends itself well to metaphoric expression as a means to understand and express anger.
Because of all of these factors, we were not surprised to find the ANGER IS HEAT metaphor.
kiišimiyani ‘you make me angry with your words’
Many languages around the world metaphorically connect anger with heat – think of familiar English expressions like hot-headed and fiery indignation. In Myaamiaataweenki and many other Algonquian languages, the same word parts that we use to talk about hot temperatures are also used when talking about anger:
kiš- ‘angry, hot’ + -im ‘by speech’ = kišim- ‘make him angry by speech, words’
Again, this is something that makes total sense from a psychological perspective: the experience of anger is distinctly associated with the experience of temperature.
Conclusion
As we keep researching emotions, language, and metaphor, what other emotions would you want to know about? How can you see this work applying to your life? Let us know in the comments!
Works Cited
Harmon-Jones, E., Peterson, C., Gable, P. A., & Harmon-Jones, C. (2013). Anger. In Handbook of approach and avoidance motivation (pp. 399-413). Psychology Press.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (2011). Metaphors we live by: With a new afterword (6. print). Univ. of Chicago Press.
Aacimotaatiiyankwi 
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