As theorized by linguistic anthropologist Bernard Perley in a recently published article, translocalization is the act of adapting non-Eurocentric ways of bernknowing into modern social contexts as a method of resistance against disempowering (usually colonial and imperialist) hegemonies. A salient example of such is found in the Lakota concept of Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ.

In Lakȟótiyapi, the language spoken by the Lakota people of the Sioux Nation, the prayer Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ can roughly be translated as “all my relations” or “all are related.” In English, is often used to describe a concept of interconnectivity that relates to the idea of one’s obligation to maintain proper relations with one’s relatives. It is important to note that historically this phrase has been the subject of cultural appropriation and has been misused as a greeting by non-Lakota persons.

Despite instances of the phrase being culturally appropriated, the concept it communicates is one with applications in other contexts: The idea that all is interconnected with all else in some way, a notion that has become increasingly accepted as humanity’s empirical understanding of the world we live in has developed, and our understanding of environmental systems has improved. In Lakota and neighboring Indigenous American societies, the concept of relations extends not just to familial relatives or other humans in general, but to features of the landscape that are not considered animate by wider society: Trees, rivers, mountains, plants and animals can all be referred to as “relatives”. That is to say, Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ is an assertion that all elements of our environment are interconnected, and that actions we take that affect part of our natural environment ultimately have the potential to affect everything in the environment. Because of its applicability to issues of environment, this phrase is intrinsically tied with social justice and has been used in the same activist contexts as mni wiconi (“water is life” in Lakȟótiyapi) and “Defend the sacred”, rallying cries for movements that have mobilized to fight the danger posed by the expansion of oil pipelines that would cause and have caused environmental damage to the surrounding ecosystems and communities they would traverse.