Passage Four
When I was about 5 years old, I used to watch a bird in the skies of southern Alberta from the Blackfoot Blood Reserve in northern Montana where I was born. I loved this bird; I would watch him for hours. He would glide effortlessly in that gigantic sky, or he would come down and light on the water and float there very majestically. Sometimes when I watched him he would creep into the grasses and waddle around not very gracefully. We called him meksikatsi, which in the Blackfoot language means “pink-colored feet”; meksikatsi and I became very good friends.
The bird had a very particular significance to me because I desperately wanted to be able to fly too. I felt very much as if I was the kind of person who had been born into a world where flight was impossible. And most of the things that I dreamed about or read about would not be possible for me but would be possible only for other people.
When I was ten years old, my life changed drastically. I found myself adopted forcefully and against my parents’ will; they were considered inadequate parents because they could not make enough money to support me, so I found myself in that terrible position that 60 percent of native Americans find themselves in, living in a city that they do not understand at all, not in another culture but between two cultures.
A teacher of the English language told me that meksikatsi was not called meksikatsi, even though that is what my people have called that bird for thousands of years. Meksikatsi, he said, was really “duck”. I was very disappointed with English. I could not understand it. First of all, the bird did not look like “duck”, and when it made a noise, it did not sound like “duck”, and I was even more confused when I found out that the meaning of the verb “to duck” came from the bird and not vice versa.
As I came to understand English better, I understand that it made a great deal of sense, but I never forgot that meksikatsi made a different kind of sense. I realized that languages are not just different words for the same things but totally different concepts, totally different ways of experiencing and looking at the world.
Questions 16-20 are based on Passage Four.
According to the passage, meksikatsi can do all of the following EXCEPT ______.
