Why I Wear A Wood Watch

By: Nimkii Brad Howie

Whether I’m teaching in a classroom, online, or on the land, one of the most common questions I get is: “Why is your watch made of wood?” or “Why do you wear a wooden watch?” This question is one of my favorites because it opens the door to sharing my people’s ways of knowing.

I wear a wooden watch for more than just fashion—it’s a reminder of one of the most incredible gifts Mother Nature provides for us.

When I was in Graduate school for environmental science, we often talked about “natural resources.” We defined natural resources as living or non-living things that humans find useful, and more importantly things that can be sold. It most likely is the way that many of us see these gifts. We learned how these could be measured, categorized, managed, and ultimately sold. This idea of economic exploitation was always the way I had thought about natural resources. But this isn’t the way I think of natural resources now.

As I've been learning Anishinaabemowin (the language of the Anishinaabe people) I always find it very useful to know what the word is in Anishinaabemowin or what the actual translation is. I find that understanding how my culture expresses a concept can really help to inform our relationship with that material. And so, I had consulted with my sister who is a near fluent speaker of Anishinaabemowin, and she didn’t know. I asked my Elders, and they didn’t know. I even tried to look up the word in Anishinaabemowin dictionaries, and still came up with nothing!

Then it all clicked for me in a near instant moment. Nobody could tell me what the word for natural resource is because we don't have a word for natural resource. This word, this concept, it simply doesn’t exist in our language. We don’t see a tree as timber, a fish as food, or land as a space for development.  We view these beings not as objects of exploitation but as brothers, as sisters, as kin, as our relatives. And when you look at a being as kin, you can’t see it as something to commodify, you see a connection.

So, I wear a wood watch to teach about how lucky and blessed we are not to have these natural resources, but these natural gifts. Wood is one of our most precious natural gifts. There are entire planets that are made of diamond, there's a great abundance of silver, platinum, and gold in the our universe. Yet there is one place in the entire universe, that we know of, where there are trees, where there is wood. That place is our shared Mother, the Earth. And that's why I love wearing my wood watch.