Kimmerer's efforts are motivated in part by her family history. Her grandfather was a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and received colonist schooling at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The school, similar to Canadian residential schools, set out to "civilize" Native children,  forbidding residents from speaking their language, and effectively erasing their Native culture. Knowing how important it is to maintain the traditional language of the Potawatomi, Kimmerer attends a class to learn how to speak the traditional language because "when a language dies, so much more than words are lost."