Capitalization conveys a certain distinction, the elevated position of humans and their creations in the hierarchy of beings. Biologists have widely adopted the convention of not capital-izing the common names of plants and animals unless they include the name of a human being or an official place name. Thus, the first blossoms of the spring woods are written as bloodroot and the pink star of a California woodland is Kellogg’s tiger lily. This seemingly trivial grammatical rulemaking in fact expresses deeply held assump-tions about human exceptionalism, that we are somehow different and indeed better than the other species who surround us. Indigenous ways of understanding recognize the personhood of all beings as equally important, not in a hierarchy but a circle.
Rules for capitalization in English give humans elevated hierarchical positions over animals, plants, insects, and other living things. We should revise this thinking and capitalize words like Maple, Heron, and Mosquito when we talking of beings and only use only use the lower case when referring to broad categories or concepts like maples, herons, and humans.