In this essay, after a brief decolonial analysis of the concept of “poetry” in Indigenous communities, I will investigate the poetic-philosophical implications of Cherokee culture, more specifically the poetic essence of the Cherokee language, the poetic aspects of Cherokee myth (pre-history) and post-myth (history), and the poetic-philosophical powers of Cherokee ritual. My first section analyzes the poetic essence, structure, special features, and historical context of the Cherokee language, drawing on Ruth Holmes and Betty Sharp Smith’s language textbook, Beginning Cherokee. My (...) second section considers poetic aspects of the pre-history and history of the Cherokee Nation considered as a text, using Robert J. Conley’s The Cherokee Nation: A History. And my third section investigates the poetic nature of the Cherokee rituals’ myth-ontological background and its existential psychological implications, via J. T. Garrett & Michael Tlanusta Garrett’s The Cherokee Full Circle: A Practical Guide to Ceremonies and Traditions. Collectively, these analyses will suggest that, just as the Cherokee and other tribes are the slandered, disenfranchised, suppressed and covered-over Indigenous peoples of the North American continent, so poetry writ large (including Indigenous philosophy) is the slandered, disenfranchised, suppressed and covered-over arche of western philosophy (as I have previously explored via a new interpretation of Nietzsche). In short, I will argue that both poetry and Cherokee culture can be understood as indigenous “absences” which are in truth vital and enduring presences. (shrink)

Our exemplar of a Native American relational ethic is depicted through the Seven Grandfather Teachings, an ancient sacred story of Potawatomi and Ojibwe peoples. These teachings state that human beings are responsible to act with wisdom, respect, love, honesty, humility, bravery, and truth toward each other and all creation. We illustrate the possible uses of this ethic through exercises wherein students reflect on the values and learn lessons related to ethics, leadership, teamwork, and relationships, or create stories using (...) Native American story form. (shrink)

Native American land ethics are not well understood by many governmental natural resource managers. This article presents the results of interviews with selected tribal elders, tribal land managers, and tribal content experts concerning traditional beliefs and values forming a land ethic and how these influence tribal land management practices. The Native American land ethic that emerged from this study includes four belief areas: “All Is Sacred”; ; “Right Action”; ; “All Is Interrelated”; ; and “Mother Earth”;. (...) Traditional Native American beliefs concerning the environment appear to spring from a spiritual context rather than the scientific‐utilitarian context more prevalent in the dominant Euro‐American culture. (shrink)

This essay explores some of the affinities between current theories of North American Indigenous trickster narratives and continental philosophy where they are both concerned with the question of responsibility in subject formations. Taking up the work of Judith Butler, Franz Kafka and Gerald Vizenor, the author works to show how both continental and Indigenous intellectual traditions work against any assumed stability for the ‘I’ in the narration of the self, yet toward responsible relationality. Such affinities, however, emerge from differing (...) socio‐cultural and linguistic horizons that are not reducible one to the other. This is particularly so with regard to the natural world and the ways in which Indigenous narratives are developed to foster responsible subjects to a larger biotic environment. Through discussion of such affinities and differences, the author seeks to broaden and multiculturalize contemporary debates in philosophy. (shrink)

The Ohlone, the original settlers of the San Francisco region, were violently dispossessed by successive colonial regimes, first Spanish, then US American. The colonial trauma was written out of history, and by the 20th century anthropologists pronounced the Ohlone to be ‘extinct’. In this article, I explore how the dispossession of the Ohlone haunt one of the greatest movies of all time: Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). Although Vertigo is one of the most-analysed films ever, no one has noticed that (...) Carlotta Valdes – the dispossessed woman who comes back from the dead to take possession of the living – would have been Native American. A hauntological reading reveals Vertigo as an unwitting witness of colonial dispossession. (shrink)

This paper argues that discussions of disability must include the same diversity in worldview as is reflected in the client population. Speaking from the perspective of Native American ontology and epistemology, the author argues that those who are considered by the dominant society as disabled might well find themselves subjugated and oppressed by that definition. The differences between a Native American worldview and that of the dominant culture is addressed. The case is made that if diversity (...) in worldview and voice is not honored, disability-based oppression is replicated and reinforced. (shrink)

Although not exactly continuous, the Native American challenge to the canon, as I have tried to show, has been of comparatively long standing. Nonetheless, inasmuch as Native American literary production and Euramerican writing influenced by it have only barely begun to enter the courses in and the anthologies of general American literature, that challenge cannot be said to have been effective as yet. No doubt it will take more time for poets and teachers to recognize (...) what Native American literatures aboriginally were and, to some extent, still are; to recognize when and if the influence of these literatures is present in work by Native and non-Native writers. It is only since the 1950s and 1960s that philological and structural work has begun to make this recognition possible in any case.It is only more recently still that an adequately sophisticated criticism for these literatures has begun to develop, with the publication of Abraham Chapman’s basic and eclectic collection of essays, Literature of the American Indians: Views and Interpretations ; Karl Kroeber’s uneven but valuable introduction to the subject, Traditional Literatures of the American Indian: Texts and Interpretations ; and Hymes’ “In Vain I Tried to Tell You”: Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics , a collection of Hymes’ seminal and indispensable work. The broadest and most sophisticated collection of essays—gathering work by Hymes, Tedlock, Toelken, Kroeber, and others—has only just appeared: Smooting the Ground: Essays on Native American Oral Literature is edited by Brian Swann, a poet and translator of Mative American song.61 These developments are encouraging for Native American literatures. As American society continues to move away from anthropocentrism and textual authority, the Native tradition may for the first time effectively assert its claim upon the canon of American literature. 61. For his translations, see, for example, Swann’s Song of the Sky: Versions of Native American Songs and Poems . Swann works from texts, not performances, from English language versions, not transcriptions of Native languages; as a result, he has made a point of insisting, “These poems of mine are not translations” but instead “versions” of Native American poetry. Although he has given up specific claims to authenticity, Swann has nonetheless shown how much can be done by the non-Native poet and scholar responding to the Native tradition as a powerful source. Arnold Krupat is a member of the literature faculty at Sarah Lawrence College. He is the coeditor of the University of Nebraska Press’ Native American Autobiography Series and is currently completing an anthology of Native American autobiographies, Indian Lives. His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, “An Approach to Native American Texts,” appeared in the December 1982 issue. (shrink)

Adversarial relations between science and religion have recurred throughout Western History. Archaeologists figure prominently in a recent incarnation of this debate as members of a hegemonic scientific elite. Postmodern debates situate disagreements in cosmological differences between innocent, traditional, native peoples and insensitive, career-mad, colonialist scientists. This simplistic dichotomy patronizes both First Peoples and archaeologists, pitting two economically marginal groups in a political struggle that neither can win. Although a few scholars have discussed the tyrannical nature of anthropological models of (...) tradition and culture, little consideration has been given to the fact that archaeology as a scientific discipline is drastically under-funded, with little research support and few jobs. Reconsideration of which political and economic groups actually benefit from the dramatization of a dichotomy between traditional and academic perspectives indicates some interesting patterns. The search for common ground is shown to have ethical implications for both the futures of First Peoples and the future of archaeology. (shrink)

In this excellent survey of Native American worldviews, philosopher of religion Jerry H. Gill emphasizes the value of tracing the overarching themes and broad contours of Native American belief systems. He presents an integrated view to serve as an introduction to ways of life and perspectives on the world far different from those of the dominant Euro-American culture. Drawing on the scholarship of anthropologists and specialists in American Indian Studies, Gill brings together much original (...) research in broad, accessible chapters. He explores Native American origin stories, the special connotations given to spatial concepts such as the cardinal directions and the circle, the influence of the seasons and the cycles of life on different cultures, and clan and kinship systems. Separate chapters are devoted to key ceremonies and customs as well as to concepts of health, harmony, virtues, wisdom, and beauty. The final chapter considers the devastating effects on native peoples of the European incursion into North America. Gill discusses the reservation system, attempts at assimilation and resistance, the recent renaissance of American Indian cultures, and prospects for the future. A valuable appendix presents a representative sampling of Native American writings on beliefs and origin stories. This excellent introduction to the many diverse yet related American Indian worldviews will be a welcome resource for teachers of introductory courses in Native American Studies or philosophy of religion, as well as laypersons with an interest in native cultures. (shrink)

In this article we examine the specific contributions Native American thought can make to the ongoing search for a Western ecological consciousness. We begin with a review of the influence of Native American beliefs on the different branches of the modem environmental movement and some initial comparisons of Western and Native American ways of seeing. We then review Native American thought on the natural world, highlighting beliefs in the need for reciprocity and (...) balance, the world as a living being, and relationships with animals. We conclude that Native American ideas are important, can prove inspirational in the search for a modem environmental consciousness, and affirm the arguments of both deep ecologists and ecofeminists. (shrink)

While claims for the return of expropriated land by Native Americans and other indigenous peoples are often evaluated using legal frameworks, such approaches fail to engage the fundamental moral questions involved. This essay outlines three justifications for Native Americans to pursue land claims: to regain properties where original ownership has not been superseded, to aid the long-term survival of their endangered cultures, and to challenge and revise the historical misremembering of mainstream American society. The third justification is (...) most controversial. It asserts that understandings of history shape perceptions of the present, and that intensively pursued land claims can provide powerful challenges to inaccurate conceptions of the past. This essay argues that Native Americans are for this reason justified in strategically pursuing land claims that are difficult to justify on other grounds, and closes with some worries about the legitimate role of strategy in political action. (shrink)

In this article we examine the specific contributions Native American thought can make to the ongoing search for a Western ecological consciousness. We begin with a review of the influence of Native American beliefs on the different branches of the modem environmental movement and some initial comparisons of Western and Native American ways of seeing. We then review Native American thought on the natural world, highlighting beliefs in the need for reciprocity and (...) balance, the world as a living being, and relationships with animals. We conclude that Native American ideas are important, can prove inspirational in the search for a modem environmental consciousness, and affirm the arguments of both deep ecologists and ecofeminists. (shrink)

In 2004, the Havasupai Tribe filed a lawsuit against the Arizona Board of Regents and Arizona State University researchers upon discovering their DNA samples, initially collected for genetic studies on type 2 diabetes, had been used in several other genetic studies. The lawsuit reached a settlement in April 2010 that included monetary compensation and return of DNA samples to the Havasupai but left no legal precedent for researchers. Through semistructured interviews, institutional review board chairs and human genetics researchers at US (...) research institutions revealed their perspectives on the Havasupai lawsuit. For interviewees, the suit drew attention to indigenous concerns over genetic studies and increased their awareness of indigenous views. However, interviewees perceived no direct impact from the Havasupai case on their work; if they did, it was the perceived need to safeguard themselves by obtaining broad consent or shying away from research with indigenous communities altogether, raising important questions of justice for indigenous and minority participants. If researchers and IRBs do not change their practices in light of this case, these populations will likely continue to be excluded from a majority of research studies and left with less access to resources and potential benefit from genetic research participation. (shrink)

This article examines the intercultural context of issues related to genetic research on Native peoples. In particular, the article probes the disconnect between Western and indigenous concepts of property, ownership, and privacy, and examines the harms to Native peoples that may arise from unauthorized uses of blood and tissue samples or the information derived from such samples. The article concludes that existing legal and ethical frameworks are inadequate to address Native peoples' rights to their genetic resources and (...) suggests an intercultural framework for accommodation based on theories of intergroup equality and fundamental human rights. (shrink)

Anticipate that this volume will nourish discussions in Native American, Indigenous, and Women's Studies, as well as in interdisciplinary courses. In respecting all of our relations, we present this journal in the spirit of healing the earth.The second theme is the incredible violence committed against Native women in the name of a continuing manifest destiny. Internalized oppression, violence turned against oneself, is devastating our communities as elders and youth stand by and watch generations of our people get (...) lost in the confusion of cultural dissonance.A third theme is the overlapping of racism, sexism, and capitalism to create an imperial system of domination over the earth's resources. Fourth, there is a need to heal ourselves and our communities. The call to know and learn from our elders the traditional understandings of our relations with all things of the universe, and how sustainable cultures may be able to offer an alternative to capitalism, remains a challenge. We must understand the need and the ways to balance ourselves with all of our relations to stop the subjugation of earth's resources, so that the "age of global imperialism" will hopefully one day be a thing of history, or at least a thing of the past in the Americas. (shrink)

Our society currently faces many complex and perplexing issues related to biotechnology, including the need to define the outer boundaries of genetic research on human beings and the need to protect individual and group rights to human tissue and the knowledge gained from the study of that tissue. Scientists have increasingly become interested in studying so-called “population isolates” to discover the nature and location of genes that are unique to particular groups. Indigenous peoples are often targeted by scientists because “the (...) relative isolation of the communities ensures minimal gene flow.” Such studies raise a number of issues related to privacy rights, property rights, informed consent, and group rights versus individual rights. These issues recently came to light in a case brought by the Havasupai Tribe and its members over the use of blood samples, handprints, and genealogy information initially taken by researchers at Arizona State University for a diabetes project. These materials were then allegedly used by researchers at ASU and other institutions for a multitude of unauthorized purposes, including research into the frequency of mental health disorders and the origin of human populations. Consequently, the affected members sued for damages under several legal theories. However, underlying all of these claims was the allegation that this unauthorized use of genetic resources and data not only injured the individuals who gave samples, but also caused a collective harm to the Havasupai Tribe and the cultural and spiritual beliefs of its members. (shrink)

Arranges the work of Viola Cordova, presenting her understanding and interpretation of the interactions between people and nature.

Images of Native Americans and of aspects of Native American culture are common in advertisements in the United States. Three such images can be distinguished — the Noble Savage, the Civilizable Savage and the Bloodthirsty Savage images. The aim of this paper is to argue that the use of such images is not morally acceptable because these images depend upon an underlying conception of Native Americans that denies that they are human beings. By so doing, it (...) also denies to them any moral standing and thus any claim to moral consideration and treatment. I begin by arguing that the traits which are distinctively human are fostered only within a cultural framework consisting of the accumulated knowledge and activities of a group of human beings. I then argue that savages are conceptualized as natural and cultureless beings. Furthermore, within the traditional Western conceptualization of the world mere natural objects have no moral standing. Thus, it follows that Native Americans insofar as they are also merely natural objects would have no standing or status as moral beings. The conception of Native Americans as savages undercuts the very conditions for the possibility of moral respect. I then turn to an application of these principles to some current commercial uses of images of Native Americans and other indigenous peoples. (shrink)

In this article we examine the specific contributions Native American thought can make to the ongoing search for a Western ecological consciousness. We begin with a review of the influence of Native American beliefs on the different branches of the modem environmental movement and some initial comparisons of Western and Native American ways of seeing. We then review Native American thought on the natural world, highlighting beliefs in the need for reciprocity and (...) balance, the world as a living being, and relationships with animals. We conclude that Native American ideas are important, can prove inspirational in the search for a modem environmental consciousness, and affirm the arguments of both deep ecologists and ecofeminists. (shrink)

This article about restorative justice practices of Native American Restorative Justice of the southwestern United States is not intended to be all-inclusive, but rather a broad thematic overview. It includes interviews with three justice practitioners of the southwestern United States: The Honorable Robert Yazzie, chief justice emeritus of the Navajo Nation Supreme Court and director of the Dine’é Policy Institute of the Dine’é College at Tsaile, Arizona, a college chartered by the Navajo Nation; Judge Joseph Flies-Away of the (...) Hualapai Nation; and James Zion, formerly solicitor to the Navajo Nation Courts, currently domestic abuse commissioner at Crownpoint, New Mexico, Family Court. (shrink)

Viola Cordova was the first Native American woman to receive a PhD in philosophy. Even as she became an expert on canonical works of traditional Western philosophy, she devoted herself to defining a Native American philosophy. Although she passed away before she could complete her life’s work, some of her colleagues have organized her pioneering contributions into this provocative book. In three parts, Cordova sets out a complete Native American philosophy. First she explains her (...) own understanding of the nature of reality itself—the origins of the world, the relation of matter and spirit, the nature of time, and the roles of culture and language in understanding all of these. She then turns to our role as residents of the Earth, arguing that we become human as we deepen our relation to our people and to our places, and as we understand the responsibilities that grow from those relationships. In the final section, she calls for a new reverence in a world where there is no distinction between the sacred and the mundane. Cordova clearly contrasts Native American beliefs with the traditions of the Enlightenment and Christianized Europeans. By doing so, she leads her readers into a deeper understanding of both traditions and encourages us to question any view that claims a singular truth. From these essays—which are lucid, insightful, frequently funny, and occasionally angry—we receive a powerful new vision of how we can live with respect, reciprocity, and joy. (shrink)

Recent developments in post-structuralist hermeneutical theory, whatever their effect on the reading of Western literature, have had an enormously salutary effect on the reading of Native American literature. With the reexamination of such concepts of voice, text, and performance, and of the ontological and epistemological status of the sign, has come a variety of effective means for specifying and demonstrating the complexity and richness of Native American narrative. The movement away from structuralism’s binary method necessarily rejected (...) Claude Lévi-Strauss’ opposition of the “myth” to the “poem,” the one infinitely translatable, the other virtually untranslatable. In Lévi-Strauss’ work, anything that might be considered the literature of the “primitive” people always appeared as myth, its “content” available for transformation into abstract pairs while its “form,” its actual language, was simply ignored or dismissed. (shrink)

In this paper, I address only one small parallel between one subsection of Western epistemology and cognitive theory and Native American epistemology. I draw the connection between the recent theories of embodied cognition and distinctive Native modes of embodied implicit procedural knowing, such as blood memory, vision questions, and non-binary logical systems. My reason for doing so is twofold. First, I show how these distinctive ways of knowing within Native worldviews are not mere mystical claims that (...) can be cast aside in favor of more ostensibly “rational” knowing practices. To do so, I utilized Mark Johnson’s account of the cognitive unconscious to demonstrate how and that Native embodied knowing practices and knowledge sources are easily explicable when examined though a phenomenological cognitive lens. Second, I highlight one small respect in which Native epistemologies are conceived of procedurally. Embodied forms of knowing are merely one facet of the procedural performative nature of Native American epistemology but they are highly demonstrative of the fact that procedural ways of knowing—knowing-how—account for deeply implicit ways of knowing that are lacking from other procedural knowledge accounts that are often hamstrung without such an accompanying account of knowing-how beyond counterfactual knowledge. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Archive, The Native American, and Jefferson’s ConvulsionsJonathan Elmer (bio)1 Saxa loquunturTrauma theory proposes that there are inscriptions that befuddle any clean divide between present and past, records that have been neither selected nor destroyed by evolutionary veto but remain in some kind of limbo, “in abeyance,” as Jacques Lacan phrases it, “awaiting attention.” In a typical maneuver, Lacan emphasizes a double meaning in the French—the “reality” (...) awaiting attention is “en souffrance” [Lacan 56]. Lacan’s wordplay injects a note of pathos into what might otherwise seem a merely cognitive or epistemological question about how, or whether, we can adequately access the historical archive, whether of individuals or of cultures. At its most basic, the psychoanalytic concept of trauma insists on this ambiguous coupling between affect and event, feeling and knowing: trauma names a happening about which one never fully knows how to feel, or feels how to know. In trauma theory—as in its various avatars in current debates about canons, about historical memory and forgetting, about cultural identity as imperiled or reclaimed or repressed—this ambiguity about the relation between affect and event becomes codified as an entanglement between the ethical and the cognitive. In “Archive Fever,” Jacques Derrida notes that the term “archive” itself harbors this ambiguity: the archive is at once the beginning and the authority, it puts into play two “orders of order,” the “sequential” and the “jussive,” “the commencement and the commandment” [9]. The divine fiat of creation is an image of the perfect coincidence of these two orders of order, while historical consciousness, in the West at least, might be understood as the progressive elaboration of the dissociation of commencement and commandment. Such a dissociation is never, perhaps, complete, which is why the question of knowing the commencement, the order of sequence of past events, always seems shadowed by an encounter with commandment, authority, ethical obligation.Derrida emphasizes a drive toward unification in the archive, what he calls the act of “consignation,” or “gathering together signs”: “Consignation aims to coordinate a single corpus, in a system or a synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration. In an archive, there should not be any absolute dissociation, any heterogeneity or secret which could separate... or partition, in an absolute manner” [10]. Because his primary topic in this essay is Freud, Derrida goes on to demonstrate how this practice and ideal of consignation deconstruct themselves in the psychoanalytic archive. On the one hand, Freud’s innovations “made possible,” or so Derrida contends, the notion of an archive that “cannot be reduced to memory: neither to memory as conscious reserve, nor to memory as rememoration, as act of recalling” [58]. On the other hand, and despite his development of this concept of an immemorial archive, however, Freud “was incessantly [End Page 5] tempted to redirect the original interest he had for the psychic archive toward archeology.” Derrida quotes an astonishing passage from the 1896 paper “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” in which Freud indulges in the fantasy that never leaves psychoanalysis, and that evinces the profound implication of this theory with other archival projects, here the imperialist dramas of ethnography. The fantasy is one in which “stones talk”:Imagine that an explorer arrives in a little-known region where his interest is aroused by an expanse of ruins, with remains of walls, fragments of columns, and tablets with half-effaced and unreadable inscriptions. He may content himself with inspecting what lies exposed to view, with questioning the inhabitants—perhaps semi-barbaric people—who live in the vicinity, about what tradition tells them of the history and meaning of these archaeological remains, and with noting down what they tell him—and he may then proceed on his journey. But he may act differently. He may have brought picks, shovels and spades with him, and he may set the inhabitants to work with these implements. Together with them he may start upon the ruins, clear away the rubbish, and, beginning from the visible remains, uncover what is buried. If his work is crowned with success, the discoveries are self-explanatory: the ruined walls are part of the ramparts of... (shrink)

An account of the specific ill of Native American mascots—that is, the particular racism of using Native Americans as mascots, as distinct from other racist portrayals of Native Americans—requires a fuller account of the function of mascots as such than has previously been offered. By analyzing the history of mascots in the United States, this article argues that mascots function as symbols that draw into an artificial unity 1) a variety of teams existing over a period (...) of time and thereby 2) a community of individuals who are thus able to use that team as their own symbolic locus of unification.This unification of teams and their concomitant communities is accomplished by appeal to a symbol that facilitates a particular fantasy of collective identity. The usage of Native American mascots is racist not only because it involves stereotypical portrayals of Native Americans, but (more specifically) because it treats Native persons simply as a means to symbolic unification—and not, importantly, as members of the community they thus serve. In other words, in these cases mascots work as unifying signifiers precisely by being the purely instrumental facilitator of a group's collective fantasy of itself. (shrink)

Since the 1990s, the relation between liberalism and colonialism has been one of the most important issues in Locke studies and also in the field of modern political thought. This present work is a unique contribution to discussion of this issue in that it elucidates Lockeâ (TM)s concept of the law of nature and his view of war. Lockeâ (TM)s law of nature includes, despite its ostensible universal validity, some particular rules which favour the rights of a European form of (...) political society and individualistic land-acquisition at the sacrifice of native traditional land-rights and subsistence. Concerning wars between settlers and the natives, Lockeâ (TM)s concept of â oepunishmentâ in state of nature allows the militarily superior side to make a war with the inferior in disregard for the latterâ (TM)s claim and nevertheless, after winning victory, proclaim its own just cause of war. By putting Lockeâ (TM)s discourse on colonization and war in the context of contemporary relations between English colonists and the natives, this book makes clear that the expansive element of his theory of property actually overbalanced his rule of limitation of property according to equitableness and that it, after all, undermines the general principles of freedom and equality of all in his law of nature. (shrink)

The allocation of self-determination rights to minority groups is a highly charged issue around the world, but the difficulties are particularly acute in the case of indigenous peoples within the white settler states. While liberal multiculturalism offers a 'solution' to this 'problem of diversity' through a system of differentiated citizenship rights, this comes only at the expense of excluding dissenting voices from the intercultural dialogue. Through an engagement with the multi-faceted critique of liberal multiculturalism advanced by Native American (...) political theory, the limits of the recognition paradigm are identified, and the possibilities offered by a reconstructed Proudhonian federalism are described. (shrink)

Contemporary Native American theater consists of a long list of plays which normally include indigenous and mixed-blood characters who often find themselves living between two worlds, that is, Native culture and white American society. Therefore, it is common to find a significant confrontation and conflict between the two cultures, which is usually solved at the end of the plays with the characters’ reconcilement or synthesis between their Native heritage and the white domineering society. In this (...) way, Native Americans can ensure their Native cultural existence and survival whilst simultaneously adapting to the changes and customs required by white American society. (shrink)