NEWSLETTER | The American Philosophical Association
Indigenous Philosophy
SPRING 2016
VOLUME 15 | NUMBER 2
FROM THE MANAGING EDITOR
Agnes B. Curry
Keeping the Flame
ANNOUNCEMENTS
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
ARTICLES
Brian Burkhart
“Locality is a Metaphysical Fact”—Theories of Coloniality and Indigenous Liberation
Through the Land: A Critical Look at Red Skin, White Masks
Anne Schulherr Waters
Earthbound Sustainability in a Vast Universe: Red Lives Matter
Larissa Couto Rogoski
El Mar Does Not Stop at Borders: Gloria Anzaldúa
VOLUME 15
|
NUMBER 2
© 2016 BY THE A MERIC AN PHILOSOPHIC AL A SSOCIATION
SPRING 2016
ISSN 2155-9708
APA NEWSLETTER ON
Indigenous Philosophy
AGNES B. CURRY, MANAGING EDITOR
FROM THE MANAGING EDITOR
Keeping the Flame
Agnes B. Curry
UNIVERSIT Y OF S AINT JOSEPH, CONNEC TICUT
Welcome to the spring 2016 newsletter from the American
Philosophical Association Committee on the Status of
Indigenous Philosophers. This edition includes three
articles. The first, by Brian Burkhart, unpacks the unique
significance of Indigenous meanings of land and of
relationship to locality for struggles against the lifedenying
effects of colonialism. The second, by Anne Waters, argues
for the constructive roles that Traditional Indigenous
Knowledges play for both addressing the increasingly dire
challenges for planetary sustainability and articulating a
balanced understanding of science. The third, by Larissa
Couto Rogoski, traces out the subtleties of Gloria Anzaldúa’s
refiguring of rationality, the relational stance Anzaldúa asks
of her readers, and the rewards of taking up such a stance.
We invite you to read and we look forward to the possibility
of dialogue on these topics, either in contributions toward
APA sessions sharing scholarship or in submissions to the
newsletter.
The committee has seen some changes since the fall 2015
newsletter. We bid an appreciative farewell to Kyle Powys
Whyte, who stepped away as committee chair. We welcome
the acting chair, Anne Waters, along with new members
Scott Pratt and Andrew Smith. As a committee, we remain
committed to all the facets of our charge. We provide a
venue for scholarship on Indigenous philosophers and
philosophies by all philosophers. We are also committed
to providing particular support and advocacy for students
who are members of Indigenous communities—particularly
those on the land base we now know as the Americas—as
they navigate the challenges of establishing themselves in
the profession.
VOLUME 15 | NUMBER 2 | SPRING 2016
sovereignty, identity, Indigeneity, economics, history,
religion, spirituality, and other recent areas of indigenous
philosophical concern.
The Indigenous Philosophy Programming Committee
has two representatives per APA Division who will do
programming for APA conferences next year: Agnes Curry
and Andrew Smith for the Eastern Division, Brian Burkhart
and Jacob Held for the Central Division, and Scott Pratt
and Zayin Cabot for the Pacific Division. Please contact
these members if you are interested in participating in any
programs or have suggestions. Deadlines will be posted
on the APA website, or feel free to contact divisional
representatives.
For the Eastern Division only, send papers or proposals
with outlines to Andrew Smith (afs52@drexel.edu) and
Agnes Curry (acurry@usj.edu)
For the Central Division only, send papers or proposals
with outlines to Brian Burkhart (brian.burkhart@csun.
edu) and Jacob Held (jmheld@uca.edu)
For the Pacific Division only, send papers or proposals
with outlines to Scott Pratt (spratt@uoregon.edu) and
Zayin Cabot (zayincabot@gmail.com)
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
We invite you to submit your work for consideration for
publication in the fall 2016 newsletter. We also welcome
comments and responses to work published in this
newsletter or the fall 2015 newsletter.
References should follow the Chicago Manual of Style; for
further information, please see the Guidelines for Authors
available on the APA website.
The submission deadline is June 1, 2016. Please submit
copies electronically to Agnes Curry at acurry@usj.edu.
ANNOUNCEMENTS
Invitation to Participate in APA Conference Programs.
We are in the process of planning conference sessions
for next academic year. We welcome submissions on
any area of philosophy including traditional subfields
such as epistemology, metaphysics, ontology, science,
mathematics, logic, social, political, ethics, and aesthetics
as well as emergent subfields and questions about gender,
APA NEWSLETTER | INDIGENOUS PHILOSOPHY
ARTICLES
“Locality is a Metaphysical Fact”—
Theories of Coloniality and Indigenous
Liberation Through the Land: A Critical
Look at Red Skin, White Masks
Brian Burkhart
C ALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSIT Y, NORTHRIDGE
Philosophical work on the structure of coloniality and
attempts to articulate meaningful resistance to the
coloniality of power as a larger structure of the “modern
world system”1 (as well as the concrete political realities of
settler colonialism for Indigenous people in settler states
like the United States and Canada) often employ anti
methods. Consider, for example, the manner in which Vine
Deloria Jr. reductively criticizes Western science while also
criticizing the reductive methodologies of Western science
themselves.
Structurally, these antimethods operate by using settler
logic against itself, a kind of inversion of Wittgenstein’s
ladder. Franz Fanon and other coloniality and liberation
theorists employ the method of existential coloniality,
the analysis of the nature of being of both colonizer
and colonized. In addition, Nelson MaldonadoTorres
describes a method he calls “decolonial phenomenology,”
a method that brackets “the assumed validity and general
legitimacy of European traditions of thought.2 Decolonial
phenomenology provides a particularly powerful method
for liberating colonized philosophy.
Indigenous philosophy is colonized by Western philosophy,
on one level, through the guardianship principle that in the
context of Indigenous nations within a settler state like the
United State conceptualizes Indigenous nations as legal
wards of that settler state. In the same manner, Western
philosophy understands Indigenous philosophy as in need
of guardianship and tutelage by EuroAmerican academic
philosophy. Indigenous philosophy exists as a ward of
Western philosophy. The bracketing of the validity and
legitimacy of EuroAmerican academic philosophy removes
the force of the guardianship principle of Western academic
philosophy over Indigenous philosophy before Euro
American academic philosophy can even begin to take up
its guardianship position. Thus, in the context of decolonial
phenomenology, one need not prove the legitimacy of
Indigenous philosophy, as the ward of philosophy, to Euro
American philosophers, as the guardians of philosophy, in
order to become fully recognized as world philosophers.
The problem of the guardianship principle for Indigenous
philosophy is only an application of the guardianship
principle that exists in the relationship between colonizer
and colonized writ large. In the context of settler states,
this is ubiquitous throughout the processes by which
Indigenous nations are recognized or not recognized
as legitimate by their settler guardians. The indigenous
struggle for decolonial liberation becomes increasingly a
PAGE 2
struggle for recognition by the settler states that continue
to colonize them. Dene political philosopher Glen Sean
Coulthard, in his recent Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting
the Colonial Politics of Recognition, argues that “the
liberal recognitionbased approach of Indigenous self
determination in Canada” not only fails but actually “serves
to reproduce the very forms of colonial power which the
original demands for recognition sought to transcend.”3
Coulthard conceptualizes the liberation from this vitiating
circle of domination through colonial power and the politics
of recognition as beginning by bracketing the legitimacy
of the settler state and its power to recognize Indigenous
nation through the guardianship principle. Through this
bracketing of the legitimacy of the settler state and settler
state power, one can perhaps analyze the manner in which
the settler state is able to reproduce the very colonial
power that it is supposed to be giving up in the process
of recognizing the legitimacy of Indigenous nations. From
this perspective, one might see how the processes of
recognition redirect Indigenous liberation strategies into
movements that reproduce settler power. As Mohawk
philosopher Taiaiake Alfred puts it
our nations have been coopted into movements
of “selfgovernment” and “land claim settlements,”
which are goals defined by the colonial state
and which are in stark opposition to our original
objectives. . . . Largescale statist solutions like
selfgovernment and land claims are not so much
lies as they are irrelevant to the root problems.
For a long time now, we have been on a quest
for governmental power and money; somewhere
along the journey from the past to the future, we
forgot that our goal was to reconnect with our
lands and to preserve our harmonious cultures and
ways of life.4
Coulthard and Alfred both recognize the origin of Indigenous
liberation has always been in the land. Coulthard puts it
thus:
The theory and practice of Indigenous
anticolonialism is best understood as a struggle
primarily inspired by and oriented around the
question of land—a struggle not only for land in
the material sense, but also deeply informed by
what the land as system of reciprocal relations and
obligations can teach us about living our lives in
relation to one another and the natural world in
nondominating and nonexploitative terms.5
Coulthard calls “this placebased foundation of Indigenous
decolonial thought and practice grounded normativity” or
“the modalities of Indigenous landconnected practices
and longstanding experiential knowledge that inform
and structure our ethical engagements with the world
and our relationships with human and nonhuman others
over time.”6 This foundation of Indigenous liberation
in the Indigenous meaning of land is transformed into a
foundation of Indigenous liberation as a struggle for land
itself, which is a conception of land fundamentally at
odds with the Indigenous meaning of land that was at the
foundation of Indigenous liberation in the first place. Thus,
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APA NEWSLETTER | INDIGENOUS PHILOSOPHY
by the end of Coulthard’s chapter on his own Indigenous
nation’s (the Dene) struggle regarding land, he shows that
“the meaning of selfdetermination” for many Indigenous
people has “reoriented from Indigenous struggle that
was once deeply informed by the land as a system of
reciprocal relations and obligations (grounded normativity)
to a struggle now increasingly for land.”7 The problem
with Coulthard’s position regarding the transformation of
the foundation of Indigenous liberation in the Indigenous
meaning of or relationship to land into a struggle for land
as a mere thing is that it brackets only the legitimacy of
the settler state and so can only see the source of this
transformation in the colonial power of the settler state
itself. This paper will use Coulthard’s discussion as a
foundation from which to extend the scope of decoloniality
theory beyond the legitimacy of the settler state through
the bracketing of Western philosophy more properly or
decolonial phenomenology. In this regard, I hope to show
that the nature of the transformation is not housed in the
power of the settler state, but in the very conceptions of
land and being in the Western philosophical imagination.
I hope to show, at least in some small part, that it is only
through an engagement with the philosophical concepts of
land and being that a more powerful decoloniality theory
can be articulated.
THE COLONIALITY OF RECOGNITION-BASED
SUBJECTIVITY AND THE BECOMING OF THE
SAVAGE OTHER
The level to which Indigenous decolonial efforts even in
the academy are, in fact, based on concepts of recognition
and recognitionbased subjectivity, and the level to which
recognitionbased subjectivity is based on a coloniality
of being, are both much deeper than Coulthard’s analysis
shows. Coulthard uses Fanon to challenge “colonized
people to transcend the fantasy that the settlerstate
apparatus is somehow capable of producing liberatory
effects.”8 In Fanon’s conception, without a break from
the structure of colonial power, the best the colonized
can hope for is “white liberty and white justice.”9 Fanon
claims that without establishing themselves as the creators
of their own values and conceptions of their identity and
its political relationship to the colonial state, colonized
peoples will eventually be subtly shaped by the “seep”
of colonial values that will undermine the possibilities of
their liberation.10 Fanon and Coulthard only limitedly see,
however, what more recent thinkers like Enrique Dussel,
Nelson MaldonadoTorres, Walter Mignolo, and others see
as the fundamental irrationality of the recognitionbased
subjectivity in the first place. The “seep” of colonial values
and concepts happens at a level almost preconceptual
since it happens at the level of the very concept of being
human, of being a human subject in the first place.
Enrique Dussel details in a number of his works the
foundation of the modern human subject in the ego
conquiro (I conquer) that is a prototype of the Cartesian
ego cogito (I think). It is in “the conquest of Mexico,”
Dussel writes, that we find “the first sphere of the modern
ego.”11 The ego conquiro comes to light in the words of
Ginés de Sepúlveda in the sixteenth century Spanish
Valladolid (a debate regarding the ontological status of
SPRING 2016 | VOLUME 15 | NUMBER 2
Indigenous peoples in the Americas). Sepúlveda argues
that the European culture grants the blessing of civilization
to the fundamentally backward (turditatum) Indians who
are not merely heathen but backwards or barbarian in
their fundamental state of being. Sepúlveda claims that
it is “in conformity with natural law that barbaric people
be subjected to the empire of princes and nations that are
more cultured and humane, so that by their virtues and
the prudence of their laws, they abandon barbarism and
are subdued by a more humane life and cult of virtue.”12
Of course, the relationship between barbaric and cultured
people is tautologically defined by the principle of identity
between European culture and superiority. As Dussel
puts it, “the content of other cultures, for being different
from [Europe], is declared nonhuman.”13 Sepúlveda puts
it most succinctly when he claims that it would be wrong
to exercise violence against the people of America if they
were found to worship the European “true God.”14 The lack
of civilization and humanity for colonized peoples is never
brought under a rational principle as it is supposed but
simply defined as such on the basis of being nonEuropean
and nonChristian. The irrationality of this “conclusion”
exposes the irrationality of the supposed rational and
principled basis of modern, enlightenment philosophy in
general and modern human subjectivity in particular. This
irrationality, seemingly made rational by Sepúlveda and
the philosophers that follow, gives philosophical merit to
the Eurocentrism at the heart of the political concepts of
recognition. For example, in the United States, this principle
of philosophical Eurocentrism justifies the religious claims
of the Doctrine of Discovery that form the backbone of
modern federal Indian law through the Marshall trilogy
of Supreme Court cases in the 1820s and ‘30s, based
on Eurocentric religious and legal claims initiated in the
fifteenth century in numerous Papal Bulls that culminate in
the Inter Cetera of 1493, which transferred title of all the
Indigenous land of the Americas to Spain and Portugal by
right of discovery.
Descartes’s ego cogito that Dussel claims follows
Sepulveda’s ego conquiro appears as a mere rational
principle that attempts to defeat skepticism regarding
knowledge of the external world. But as Nelson
MaldonadoTorres argues, the Cartesian ego cogito arises
from Sepulveda’s ego conquiro as both are fundamentally
directed at “Manichean misanthropic skepticism,” which
“is not skeptical about the existence of the world or the
normative status of logics and mathematics,” but is “a form
of questioning the very humanity of colonized peoples.”15
This skepticism is the foundation of Sepulveda’s ego
conquiro as well as Descartes’s ego cogito. Originating
perhaps in the Spanish Inquisition at the end of the fifteenth
century, this skepticism seeks to find the “baptized men
and women of Jewish or Muslim descent [who] were
consider stained by the ancestral heresies,” to seek out the
“enemy within”—those who had converted but were guilty
of carrying “stained blood.”16 Modern skepticism begins,
MaldonadoTorres argues, in the protoracism of the
Inquisition. The ego conquiro overcomes this skepticism of
the humanity of the other through the creation of an ego that
is undoubtable or unquestionable. The Manichean other to
this undoubtable or unquestionable ego is relegated to
the savage state. The savage other is no longer doubtable
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APA NEWSLETTER | INDIGENOUS PHILOSOPHY
or questionable (as he or she is in the Inquisition) but is
completely known as the dominated other. The domination
of the savage other solidifies the claim to confidence that
is placed in the undoubtable and unquestionable ego. This
domination is what brings the unquestionable ego into
being. Its logical unquestionableness is manifested into an
actual unquestionableness through the initial and continual
domination of the savage other. It is through colonial
domination that the I am of European humanness is fully
actualized and the skepticism regarding the humanity of
the Indigenous other is fully determined in the oppositional
savage or nonhuman, dominatable other.
The irrationality of the Indigenous being becoming
recognized as fully human is here exposed. The I am of
European humanness exists only in relation to the nonhuman other. Thus Indigenous being can only become
human by becoming what it is not: European. Alternatively,
Indigenous being can become an approximation of what
it is not through the approximation of European being
by approximating the ego conquiro. This is why, even
though Hegel’s recognitionbased subjectivity seeks to
situate human subjectivity, in contrast to the seemingly
solipsistic ego cogito, in relations of recognition that are
constitutive of human subjectivity, the ego conquiro is
maintained in recognitionbased subjectivity and politics of
recognition. Hegel asserts that “selfconsciousness exists
in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for
another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged.”17
Dialectically, the master/slave or colonizer/colonized
relationship is supposed to move beyond the ego conquiro
through mutual relations of recognition. The ego conquiro
of the master/colonizer, on this reading of Hegel, is not
recognized as a being for itself because it is recognized
by the conquered slave/savage who is a mere being for
the master. Relations of recognition must move beyond the
master and slave, “beyond the patterns of domination,” a
seemingly impossible task even in concept.18 Hegel clearly
understands the ego conquiro as an essential stage in the
development of fully human subjects. He writes in section
III of The Introduction to The Philosophy of History, “The
human being acquires confidence in himself (Zutrauen zu
sich selbst),” and “Man discovers America, its treasures and
its people, he discovers nature, he discovers himself (sich
selbst).”19 Hegel’s dominating subjectivity cannot move
beyond this domination in relation to the savage other,
I would argue. The savage other has become essentially
savage and so can only become the kind of subjectivity that
can recognize the colonizer insofar as he or she becomes
something he or she is not. The only way the savage can
hope to even approximate the kind of being that could
give the colonizer the mutual recognition that Hegel claims
he or she desires is to approximate the subjectivity of the
colonizer, the ego conquiro.
FANON ON THE NECESSITY OF DECOLONIAL
STRUGGLE OR DECOLONIAL RESISTANCE
THROUGH THE L AND
Fanon sees the trap of the master/slave or colonizer/
colonized through a lens of struggle. The liberation of
colonized people through Hegel’s dialectical progression
to mutual recognition is undermined by the lack of struggle
PAGE 4
in present colonial contexts. Unlike Hegel’s master/slave
story, colonizer and colonized are not locked in a lifeordeath struggle. In colonized societies, “the White Master,
without conflict, recognize[s] the Negro slave.”20 “The black
man,” he writes is “acted upon.” Values “not created by
his actions” or “born of the systolic tide of his blood” are
thrown upon him from without. Thus being set free by the
master here means nothing to the slave. The slave goes
“from one way of life to another, but not from one life to
another.”21 For Fanon, it is through struggle and conflict,
which he understands as often necessarily violent, that
colonized peoples can shrug off the coloniality of their
being. This kind of conflict is necessary, on Fanon’s account,
in order for recognition to achieve selftransformation
for the colonized subject, for her to achieve the “inner
differentiation” at the level of her colonized being that is
necessary to achieve the realization of freedom.22 This is
what Fanon understands as the break that is necessary for
colonial struggles for “Liberty and Justice” to not merely
be struggles for “white liberty and white justice,” a non
alienated identification with the recognition conferred
upon the slave by the master.23
Coulthard rightly questions Fanon’s instrumental view
of the decolonial struggle. Coulthard points out that this
view of colonial resistance does not match the views and
practices of Indigenous people in their decolonial liberation
strategies, particularly in the context of First Nations in
Canada. This is why Coulthard and Alfred both reference as
the foundation of Indigenous resistance a relationship to
land. Fanon does not see a deeper Indigenous resistance
that already exists in the Indigenous relationship to land.
Fanon thinks struggle is necessary for the colonized to
differentiate, to begin to become aware of the deepest
manners in which his being is colonized. But from the
perspective of Indigeneity and its ontological connect to
land, Fanon’s claim is not true. What creates the alienation
from the coloniality of being that is necessary to manifest
true acts of decolonial resistance is our, as Indigenous
people, ontological kinship with the land. In this way, our
being is never colonized to the point in which we do not
experience the alienation of coloniality that Fanon thinks
often requires a lifeordeath struggle with the colonizer
to achieve. No matter how powerful the colonial operation
on human subjectivity through the ego conquiro, there
is always a remainder of our Indigenous being that quite
literally is in the land. Being is itself, in the context of
Indigeneity, an orginary and continual manifestation out of
the land. It is, thus, this core of our being as Indigenous
people that originates out of and continues to exist in the
land that provides the differentiation necessary to begin
decolonial resistance—and not, as Fanon says, the struggle
itself.
Because of this lack of understanding of the intersection
of Indigeneity and land that both creates the capacity
of coloniality in the first place (a topic I will cover in the
next section) and means that colonialism will necessarily
always be incomplete, Fanon cannot see the scope of the
possibilities of decolonial resistance that can exist outside
and transcend the vitiation circle of human subjectivity,
the politics of recognition, and the lifeordeath struggle
between the colonizer and the colonized. One way of
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APA NEWSLETTER | INDIGENOUS PHILOSOPHY
teasing this out is through what Black Elk says about the
Black Road in his vision that is mirrored by the current
visions of some young Wisca Wakan (medicine men) of the
Lakota and Dakota nations. Black Elk is shown the earth in
his vision as
lying yonder like a hoop of peoples, and in the
center bloomed the holy stick that was a tree,
and where it stood there crossed two roads, a red
one and a black. “From where the giant lives (the
north) to where you always face (the south) the
red road goes, the road of good,” the Grandfather
said, “and on it shall your nation walk. The black
road goes from where the thunder beings live
(the west) to where the sun continually shines (the
east), a fearful road, a road of troubles and of war.
On this also you shall walk, and from it you shall
have the power to destroy a people’s foes.”24
The black road from Black Elk’s vision corresponds to
the Manichean struggle between the colonizer and the
colonized, between good and evil. Using Black Elk’s
vision, one could interpret the great destructive power
that comes through binary constructions of knowledge
in the history of technology as well as the penchant for
conflict that comes from Manichean understandings of
identity. The civilized are good. The savage are evil. The
colonized are good. The colonizers are evil. Following this
black road from our own desires and fears to our own
ideas about how to understand and deal with them in a
modality of understanding relationships and conflict that is
manifestly kinshipless results in violence and destruction.
The red road, alternatively, goes from the unmanifest field
of kinship itself in the realm of spirit in the red north to
the body or manifest world of our actual kinship relations.
When we walk on this road and when we attempt to achieve
understanding of our relationships as a function of the red
road, our desires and fears are transformed through our
larger kinship as conceptualized through the movement
through this unmanifest kinship field or our unparticularized
kinship itself.
The power and destructive force of the black road is
addictive. This ultimately (or at least fundamentally)
destructive road, in Black Elk’s understanding and his
understanding of the world he lived in, was sometimes
necessary. The black road can be seen as the nuclear
option to coloniality. From Black Elk’s vision, this road was
presented as necessary for at least some Indian people
to survive, but it was a road where most everyone dies. It
was not a road of survival in a positive sense but survival
in an almost tragic sense. In recent years, many young
Wisca Wakan medicine men have had visions that mirror
and extend ideas from Black Elk’s vision. More than likely,
these medicine men have never read Black Elk’s words so
the continuity is within the ceremonies themselves. The
vision communicates the need to change the color of the
West in the ceremonies from Black to Blue. In the context
of this paper, there is little else that can be said about this
change because the words, as the words in all Indigenous
ceremonies, have power and so can only be used in the
appropriate exercising of that power or in the context of
the ceremonies themselves. Indigenous people do not,
SPRING 2016 | VOLUME 15 | NUMBER 2
for example, sing prayer songs outside of ceremonies any
more than a neurosurgeon performs brain surgery outside
of the operating room. What can be shared in this context
is the manner that this transformation from black to blue
manifests itself into the community, as seen, for example
in the Thunder Valley CDC near Kyle, SD, in the Pine Ridge
reservation. In this context, this transformation manifests
itself as a commodity of hope. Rather than understanding
the situation of the people in this community in the context
of colonized victims, the Thunder Valley CDC conceptualizes
its meaning in relationship to the future of the Lakota
nation and its people as a meaning that transcends the
Manichean conception of colonizer and colonized through
an understanding of the Lakota people as transcending
coloniality insofar as they exist and have always existed as
beings that originate and continue as manifestations of the
Lakota land. The conception of true liberation that arises in
this transformation of the black to the blue is a liberation
that arises through a regrounding of our Indigenous being
in the land that is itself beyond the Manichean conception
of colonizer and colonized.
JOHN WAYNE AS WILE E. COYOTE AND THE
DECOLONIAL RESISTANCE OF L AND ITSELF
The John Wayne and John Ford films Stagecoach (1939)
and The Searchers (1956) always seemed like Wile E.
Coyote cartoons to me as a child. All of the Indian extras
are Navajo and speak and dress like Navajo even though
they are supposed to be Cheyenne, Apache, Comanche,
and so on. The funniest thing about these movies,
however, is that they are both presented as extensive
journeys. The stagecoach travels for hundreds of miles
across “dangerous” Apache territory, and The Searchers is
a decadelong adventure across the entire Great Plains in
the search for John Wayne’s niece who was captured by
Comanche as a young girl. This presentation is undermined,
however, by the fact that John Wayne does nothing more
than travel in circles on horseback or by stagecoach around
and around the three rock formations of Tsé Bii’ Ndzisgaii
(Monument Valley) that early colonial settlers called The
Mittens. What is interesting and illuminating about these
films is that, while the reality is that John Wayne is Wile
E. Coyote, the films are presented as serious cowboy
and Indian conflicts and adventures. In this final section,
I want to use the scenes of John Wayne circling around
and around those Navajo rocks while pretending to go on
long adventures across the Indigenous landscape of the
Great Plains to articulate the manner in which Indigenous
land itself, just as Indigenous being out of the land,
resists colonization and has the power to move beyond
the Manichean concept of colonizer and colonized. In the
section above, I tried to show how modern subjectivity,
the modern definition of being human, arises out of the
ego conquiro, the ego that is defined by its ability to deny
humanity or agency to others. The structure of domination
exists in relationship to the modern conception of land
as well. For example, the modern concept of property as
articulated by Locke tells us that in order to own land one
must become the kind of being that dominates the land
in such a way as to deny access to others. Similar to the
manner in which coloniality operates upon subjectivity,
coloniality operates on the land. The way that coloniality is
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APA NEWSLETTER | INDIGENOUS PHILOSOPHY
able to operate in this way is that it functions necessarily
on an underlying, preexisting and more fundamental
order I call locality. Locality is the orginary and continual
manifestation of being, knowing, and meaning out of the
land, but locality is also the manifestation of the being of the
land itself. Locality is a fundamentally important Indigenous
concept. In fact, I would argue, it is a fundamental feature
of Indigeneity itself. It is not a mere Indigenous concept,
though, whatever that would mean. It is a metaphysical
fact of being, knowing, meaning, and the land. Now, to
understand this claim, we must harken back to the trickster
antimethods of Vine Deloria Jr. and others that use settler
logic against itself. These trickster antimethods are not
merely deconstructive, however, since what Deloria and
others are trying to reveal is an Indigenous conception
of philosophical locality that is fundamentally real. This
localized realism of Indigenous thought transcends
the delocalized binaries of Western realism and social
constructivism. At the very least, in this context, I think it is
important to not merely allow all the Western philosophers
from Plato to Descartes and following to speak philosophy
proscriptively and Indigenous philosophers to only be
allowed to speak philosophy descriptively. The descriptive
requirement for Indigenous philosophy arises from the
ego conquiro that concretizes the savage other as a mere
passive artifact that is only capable of speaking authentic
or inauthentic cultural truths rather than speaking as
civilized philosophers are understood to—as fully human
agents who are capable of perceiving and speaking truths
even in an ideal or proscriptive sense. So it is in the spirit of
Deloria’s trickster antimethods that I make the proscriptive
philosophical claim that locality is a metaphysical fact.
Regardless of the status of that claim, it is clear that
coloniality as a structure accepts locality as a fact.
Coloniality must understand the concept of locality in order
to operate upon it in the way that it does. But just as our
being in its locality resists colonization—a remainder of our
being always exists in the land in contrast to the coloniality
of our being as colonized people—so the being of the land
itself resists colonization. A remainder of the being of the
land as locality always exists in contrast to the coloniality
of land itself as a delocalized abstraction, as mere land.
The colonization of our subjectivity and of land is never
complete. Neither can be fully colonized because of their
locality. The manner in which coloniality operates on the
land can be illuminated by the experiences that any viewer
of these John Wayne and John Ford films can have. Anyone
who looks carefully enough can see that John Wayne is
Wile E. Coyote, that he is doing nothing more than circling
around those three rock formations over and over. The
viewer that has this experience, that sees John Wayne as
Wile E. Coyote, sees the locality of these Navajo rocks in
Tsé Bii’ Ndzisgaii.
How does this work? Let me attempt to explain this process
more clearly. Coloniality operates fundamentally through an
attempted obscuring of locality—in other words, through
delocality. Delocality is the attempt to hide all locality, both
Indigenous and European localities. Coloniality operates
first through the attempted removal of European locality
from itself. Coloniality begins with an attempted abstraction
out of European locality a delocalized, universalized
PAGE 6
system of culture, values, meaning, being, and so forth. A
locality that now floats free from the European land that is
its orginary and continual ground or being and meaning
in locality is able to operate on land and people across
the planet. Now this delocalized and then universalized
European locality is then, at least attemptedly, injected into
the Indigenous localities of the American continent in an
attempt to remove and replace Indigenous localities with
this universalized European locality, a European locality
that has now become a delocality or false locality because
it is removed from and now floats free of the land that is
its ground of being and meaning. However, the process
of removing and replacing Indigenous localities with
universalized European delocalities as the fundamental
process of colonialism is never complete. Just as it does
not work with human subjectivity, it does not work with
the land. The Indigenous locality is still there. If the viewer
looks closely enough, he or she can see it in those scenes in
Stagecoach and The Searchers. It is the seeing of locality of
Tsé Bii’ Ndzisgaii in those films that transforms John Wayne
into Wile E. Coyote. The fundamentally inept attempts by
John Wayne and John Ford to obscure the locality of Tsé
Bii’ Ndzisgaii in these films appears, once the viewer sees
the locality of these Navajo rocks, to be just like the inept
attempts of Wile E. Coyote to catch the everpresent and
always remaining Roadrunner.
The operations of coloniality on the land are generally not
so inept and so generally not as funny. The experience we
have as Indigenous people when toxic waste is dumped
in the rivers of our localities, when a burial mound is
bulldozed, when a pipeline is placed around our valleys
and over our mountains is not one of laughter as it is with
the inept attempted coloniality by John Wayne and John
Ford over Tsé Bii’ Ndzisgaii. There are often tears and
heartbreak because it is hard for us to see the remainder
of that land that still exists in its locality even after such
attempts at colonial destruction. It is hard for us to see,
after such seemingly complete colonialism through delocality, the remainder of the being of the land that still
exists, that will always resist this delocalizing process, that
will never be completely colonized. It was just as hard, it
seems, for Franz Fanon to see the remainder of being that
existed and exists still for colonized people as that part
of our being that is in the land, which is our locality. Thus
Fanon saw little hope for Indigenous liberation that could
come from outside of the Manichean circle of colonizer
and colonized. The struggle was for him always within this
circle rather than something that, as Indigenous liberation
strategies show, can arise from our Indigenous being in the
land or our locality.
NOTES
1.
I. Wallerstein, The Modern World-System (New York: Academic
Press, 1974).
2.
N. MaldonadoTorres, “On the Coloniality of Being,” 245.
3.
G. S. Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial
Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2014), 2324.
4.
T. Alfred, Wasase: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom
(Toronto: Broadview Press, 2005), 31.
5.
Coulthard,Red Skin, White Masks, 13.
SPRING 2016 | VOLUME 15 | NUMBER 2
APA NEWSLETTER | INDIGENOUS PHILOSOPHY
6.
Ibid., 13.
7.
Ibid., 78.
8.
Ibid., 23.
Wallerstein, I. The Modern World-System. New York: Academic Press,
1974.
9.
F. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. R. Philcox (New York:
Grove Press, 1952), 221.
Williams, R. “Hegel and Nietzsche: Recognition and Master/Slave.”
Philosophy Today, 45 no. 5 (2001): 164–79.
by Louis R. Gordon, T. Denean SharpleyWhiting, and Renee T. White,
134–51. Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.
10. F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. R. Philcox (Paris:
Presence Africaine, 1963), 9.
11. E. Dussel, “Europe, Modernity, and Eurocentrism,” Nepantla: Vies
from South 1.3 (2000): 471.
12. G. D. Sepúlveda, Tratado sobre las Justicas causas de la Guerra
contra los indios (México: FCE, 1967), 85.
13. E. Dussel, “AntiCartesian Meditations: On the Origin of the
Philosophical AntiDiscourse of Modernity,” Human Architecture:
Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 11, no. 1 (2013): 11.
Earthbound Sustainability in a Vast
Universe: Red Lives Matter
Anne Schulherr Waters
INDEPENDENT SCHOL AR
14. Sepúlveda, Tratado sobre las Justicas causas de la Guerra contra
los indios, 117.
15. N. MaldonadoTorres, “On the Coloniality of Being,” Cultural
Studies, 22 no. 2 (2007): 245.
16. I. Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins
of the Civilized World (Latin America Otherwise) (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2004), 3132.
17. G. W. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. Miller (Oxford:
Oxford University Press,1977), 178.
18. R. Williams, “Hegel and Nietzsche: Recognition and Master/
Slave.” Philosophy Today, 45 no. 5 (2001): 16.
19. Quoted in Dussel, “AntiCartesian Mediations,” 4.
20. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 217.
21. Ibid., 220.
22. L. Turner, “On the Difference between the Hegelian and Fanonian
Dialectic of Lordship and Bondage,” in Fanon: A Critical Reader,
eds. Louis R. Gordon, T. Denean SharpleyWhiting, and Renee T.
White (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 146.
23. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 221.
24. J. G. Niehardt, Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy
Man of the Oglala Sioux, 29.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alfred, T. Wasase: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom. Toronto:
Broadview Press, 2005.
Coulthard, G. S. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of
Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
Dussel, E. “Europe, Modernity, and Eurocentrism.” Nepantla: Views
from South 1.3 (2000): 465–78.
Dussel, E. “AntiCartesian Meditations: On the Origin of the Philosophical
AntiDiscourse of Modernity.” Human Architecture: Journal of the
Sociology of Self-Knowledge 11, no. 1 (2013): 1–40.
Fanon, F. Black Skin, White Masks, translated by R. Philcox. New York:
Grove Press, 1952.
Fanon, F. The Wretched of the Earth, translated by R. Philcox. Paris:
Presence Africaine, 1963.
Hegel, G. W. Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A. Miller. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1977.
MaldonadoTorres, N. “On the Coloniality of Being.” Cultural Studies, 22
no. 2 (2007): 240–70.
Niehardt, J. G. Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of
the Oglala Sioux. William Morrow & Company, 1932.
Sepúlveda, G. D. Tratado sobre las Justicas causas de la Guerra contra
los indios. México: FCE, 1967.
Silverblatt, I. Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the
Civilized World (Latin America Otherwise). Durham: Duke University
Press, 2004.
Turner, L. “On the Difference between the Hegelian and Fanonian
Dialectic of Lordship and Bondage.” In Fanon: A Critical Reader, edited
SPRING 2016 | VOLUME 15 | NUMBER 2
SYNOPSIS
A. Traditional Sustainability
“Sustainability” means ecological, economic, political,
legal, agricultural, environmental, etc., sustainability, or
continuity, and comes into play when “stability” flutters.
Climate and environmental changes create a loss of
communal land base, alongside losses of traditional
localized indigenous knowledge and practice, and
sometimes an admixture of cultures that join together for
sustainability. Humanity has not enthusiastically embraced
these environmental problems as a globally interconnected
web of nation states that have survival problems—rather,
the common response is to hope these survival challenges
can be put off or be “kicked forward” to a later generation.
Most sustainability issues, however, cannot be passed
on to a later generation, for our crises are current and
dramatic. Sustainability of humanity and all our relations
on planet Earth may benefit from smallscale, diversely
localized environmental practices of Traditional Indigenous
Knowledge (TIK).
B. Indigenous Sustainability and Queries of “Western
Science”
Traditional Indigenous Knowledge (TIK) can fill gaps of
local and historical data because it can contextualize to
locality and geography, and it carries histories about
surviving climactic crises from many generations ago. TIK
emphasizes cooperative, interdependent survival, or a
balance of living well in reciprocity with all Being and all
our relations. Traditional indigenous science is about how
to achieve and sustain such a balance of life. No science
is value free, and all contemporary Western science is
justified to be used to solve environmental crises of human
survival. Native science can be used in the service of the
survival of humankind, all our relations, and our planet, for
native science is a gift to the world as we know it. Tools
of both Western science and traditional native science can
be interjected, commingle, and be complementarily used
alongside one another in efforts to sustain humankind and
all our relations upon planet Earth and in the cosmos.
C. Western and Indigenous Science
Assumptions of metaphysical being and ontological
relations support political governance of global
economic and environmental theories that affect human
sustainability. Indigenous scientific principles of “balance,”
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“interdependency,” and “selfdetermination” can serve to
open an international and global dialogue about human
survival and use of natural resources. Knowledge about
“localized” differences of traditional indigenous science
bring diversely localized information, diverse perspectives
of ontological relations, and diverse metaphysicalspiritual
values to planning tables of Western science. As well,
knowledge of “universal” theories of Western thought,
theories of action acontextualized from interdependency
of relations, and hegemonic metaphysical spiritual values
serve to interject Western culture into indigenous science.
Yet negotiated sharing of scientific epistemologies of many
nations can well serve our contemporary political and
veridical struggles to sustain human life.
D. Traditional Indigenous Science
Indigenous localized knowledge, unlike Western global
science, can “fit” together what appears to Western
science as anomalous or irrelevant information about
our environment into a localized geographicalhistorical
context. This practice can make sense of climactic and
environmental changes and solutions that Western science
has not previously understood. Some successful localized
indigenous principles could function as “sovereign
practices of environmental pragmatics” because they
are sound. Indigenous localized beliefs and sustainable
practices are fruits of agricultural and medicinal diversity,
developed over thousands of years and shared by
traditional indigenous elders as native science.
E. Buen Vivir (Good Life) - Vivir Bien (Living Well)
The phrases “good life,” or “living well” describe a global
movement led by indigenous scholars and leaders that
responds to global (localized) sustainability crises. This
movement (begun in Equador and successfully spreading
to Bolivia and elsewhere) seeks to develop models of ethical
action that reflect balance, respect, selfdetermination,
cooperation, interconnectedness, and interdependency
with all our relations. This political, economic, agricultural,
and environmental theory translates to actionoriented
practices that respect all life. This movement necessitates
a shift from values of accumulation to a balance (even a
strained balance) of respect for interconnected relations
that are interdependent of all Being as webbed together.
What this means for notions of selfdetermination and
sovereignty is on the horizon, and yet unknown, but it
is certain to embody an ethics of “take no more than is
needed” while remembering the importance of retaining
diversity of knowledge.
F. Poem: On Sustainability, Self-Determination, and Survival
A. TRADITIONAL SUSTAINABILITY
How do we humans think about the earthbound project
of sustainability? To ponder this query, I believe we may
not need to investigate epistemological questions about
the “how” of human inquiry, or address binary or non
binary dualities or nondualities of discrete or nondiscrete
logic of our thought. Rather, we need merely observe
and contemplate what sustainability means for us in our
immediate environment, with and among those with
whom we share a common environment, humanity, and
destiny of all our relations. To paraphrase Vine Deloria,
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Jr., an indigenous philosophy may begin such a project
by interjecting Western (non-indigenous) ideas into an
indigenous worldview to examine and explain indigenous
sustainability issues alongside Western (non-indigenous)
sustainability issues.1 (Though the words “indigenous” and
“Western” are denotatively ambiguous and vague, they
serve the purpose here of delineating particular types of
curricular knowledge bases and history, having different
origins, practices, and understandings about scientific
theory. Connotatively, I mean to have them on an equal
value par for purposes of this paper, for what is important
is what we can know about our world and ourselves as part
of that world.)
In this cooperative spirit today, then, we engage a
few questions that matter to us. First is the meaning
of the term “sustainability.” To sustain is to enable
continuation, to maintain some balance of survival of our
human species, and, for some, of the planet. Second,
“sustainability” refers to climate change, and much has
been written about our climactic shifts. Third, there are
different types of sustainability—from global indigenous
journals and papers to the many philosophy and science
websites, including the website of the President of the
United States; articles and books abound on the topics
of economic sustainability, environmental sustainability,
legal sustainability, and even governmental sustainability.
As such, “sustainability” replaces the term “stability”—
for “sustainability” only comes into play when “stability”
flutters, or nonbalance, or disharmony, comes into play.
Folks that benefit from the former stability of colonial
governments, or economic or legal systems, for example,
have reason now to know that many hegemonic economic
systems that maintain other systems in place, for instance,
have lost or are losing stability. For some the lack of a stable
government, economic, or legal system is good news, and
reason to hope for a more balanced future of benefits and
responsibilities. For others it may mean the opposite. But
for all, sustainability of human life and all our relations are
serious questions on the horizon that go hand in hand with
sustainable systems of human interaction. And survival
answers to these survival queries will demand some type
of change in our human ways of being.
Consider, for example, the effect of less stable weather
(when a weather system generates data of large fluctuations
and change). How does this affect human sustainability?
For some it means a drought that destroys vegetation and
vegetative projects, critical to human survival, or at least
survival for all. For others it means extreme flooding over
plains otherwise full of fauna and flora. Weather conditions
that create planetary instability call for human responses
that can enable our maintenance, or sustainability, of crops
and other forms of life to continue, so as to contribute
to human species survival. This “sustainability call” is of
utmost importance to farmers and all participating in the
food industry. In the United States, primary players include
California, where onethird of our nation’s food is grown;
in Florida, where another onethird is grown; and in the
Midwest, which also grows onethird of our nation’s food
supply. Weather change is of utmost importance to end
users of survival commodities—to everyone.
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Conferences are held in Africa about the decimation of
ecosystem species where lands are no longer as fertile,
wet, and giving to animal life forms, once so necessary to
survival of local communities. Conferences in the Americas
discuss why American indigenous communities up north
are still being pushed back from their shore fishing
community cultures, developments that necessitate groups
of differently cultured indigenous neighbors join together
for survival. This North American admixture of culture
and loss of land base has had an effect of lost localized
geographical knowledge and culture. Such changes
upend localized origination and medical information and
practices as well as other storehouses of traditional elder
indigenous knowledge that may no longer be applicable to
the new geographical location. Such localized knowledge,
however, if maintained and preserved, may prove helpful in
the future to bring different knowledge bases to diversely
changing communities and environments. In other words,
the lack of weather stability, for example, bringing about
nonsustainability of some cultural practice may mean bad
news, but the sharing of informative indigenous knowledge
bases by the devastated community, knowledge which
enables adaptation, has the potential to bring about much
good.
Consider another example. Due to increased climate
shifts alongside overcrowded populations, a lack of clean
drinking water (onethird of world does not have clean
drinking water) and of sustainable food supplies (half of the
world does not have a steady and reliable, or sustainable,
food supply) challenges current lifestyles, both indigenous
and Western. Western sustainability research for the next
generation may not be so much about the exchange
of personal wealth, but about how to best use human
wealth to create sustainable lifestyles for humanity. This
is because right now human societal practices as a whole
are non-sustainable. If political and social change is to
assist development of sustainable practices among all our
relations, meaningful and knowledgeable conversations
about sustainable and nonsustainable practices will need
to be stimulated and need to occur on a regular basis. Such
conversations can create a movement that can focus upon
and develop sustainable lifestyles for humans alongside all
our relations on our turtle planet, Mother Earth.
Inconveniently so, it may not be good enough today to
simply try to “kick the sustainability ball” down to the next
generation. There may not be leisurely or even adequate
time to wait for the next generation to plan and exercise
sustainable practices. People of conscience easily
recognize that the sustainability movement needs now
to be directed toward negotiation of survival practices,
and economic and governmental distribution of survival
goods, in order to maintain our necessary diverse species’
sustainability among all our relations. Importantly, if we do
not deal with these issues now, there may not be a next
generation to kick the ball down to. As well, if the human
species cannot be made sustainable, moral questions
about leaving sustainability decisions to future generations
resource management become moot. So the ball must be
picked up and the next generation assured sustainability of
human life in their own generation and hopefully, beyond.
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This sustainability precept of action is close to another
principle of sustainability dear to my own heart, namely,
selfdetermination. Selfdetermination must be a part of
sustainability decisions because the autonomy to exercise
selfdeterminative rights to selfsustain maintains the
balance of respect among all our relations. Without a right
to exercise selfdeterminative sustainability practices, a
society always owes something to someone or something
for survival. Such imbalances of power relations between
the owed and the owing opens up opportunity for
disharmony (instability) among all our relations. Human
action must “fit” within the context of all our relations,
either fairly with a harmony of balance, or unfairly with a
discord of equanimity. An imbalance of power relations can
set up a rather uncomfortable exercise for the owing and
thereby provide reason to upset the sustainability of the
owed, had at the expense of the owing.
Some of you who know my work in this area of self
determination may think I mean something like political
selfdeterminative governance here. And surely this is a
part and parcel of a sustainable package for survival. Today,
in using the term “selfdetermination,” I mean to refer to
“selfdetermination” as both individual and community
ability to exercise a right to make community planning
decisions in accord with plans to responsibly maintain and
practice interdependent cultural knowledge respectfully,
by paying homage to our interconnected environmental
relations within our cosmos, both known and not known.
The importance of selfdetermination is that with it we
can bring to our project of sustainability the wealth of
intergenerational elder knowledge, of cultivating health,
moral responsibility, and social forms of cooperation,
alongside the use of more contemporary technologies
as we understand them. How we apply together both
Traditional Indigenous Knowledge (TIK) technologies with
Contemporary Western Knowledge (CWK) technologies,
will determine how we humans and all our relations can
mutually benefit with those with whom we share our
environment, planet, cosmos, or, as some say, all our
relations (plants, animals, water, and all other being of the
universe). For in this life sharing, and interdependence, we
are all related.
When we adapt our ancestors’ traditional, cultural,
indigenous knowledge and physical and spiritual practices
and ways of being to interjected contemporary Western
knowledge, theory, and technical and spiritual challenges
of science, we exercise our selfdetermination while we
hope to sustain our lives within our own communities.
When we adhere to tried and true traditional tribal values of
cooperation, sustenance, community, and wellbeing, we
hope to sustain balance in our cosmos. These are the values
that have sustained our indigenous communities over time
and that are close to us to use as we work toward learning
how to sustain ourselves during our contemporary climactic
changes, and other disaster oriented challenges. (Similarly,
the “Western educational curriculum” could benefit by
interjecting traditional indigenous knowledge into their
own explanatory stories and theory developments.)
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Sustainability is a unique part of traditional indigenous
knowledge. That which has sustained us is alive and with
us today and keeps us inspired and optimistic about the
future. Traditional knowledge and practice about how to
live among all our relations upon Mother Earth in both
physical and metaphysical ways, is about facing survival
paths of action oriented toward sustainable survival. Self
determinative aspects of traditional sustainable practices
motivate their continued survival. This selfdeterminative
sustainability is what I mean to refer to when I talk about
“traditional sustainability.”
B. INDIGENOUS SUSTAINABILITY AND QUERIES
OF “WESTERN” SCIENCE
Much traditional indigenous global knowledge of Mother
Earth has been lost in many geographical regions due
to severe climactic changes or settler political overlay.
Kyle Powys Whyte, a Potawatomie scholar of the Great
Lakes region, has focused on the importance of modern
day scientists showing respect for traditional, localized
indigenous knowing. He notes that traditional indigenous
knowledge can fill gaps of both local and historical data,
and filling these gaps beneficially can “expand the sorts of
things that [Western] scientists consider in their research
methods.”2
Kyle’s work recognizes and organizes some of the body
of scholarship that Vine Deloria and others were working
on when they wrote about the utility and value of native
science during the past few decades. Kyle uses the insights
of indigenous scholars to speak to how everyone can
benefit from native science, or what we may call traditional
indigenous cultural and environmental knowledge. This
knowledge is both of a physical and spiritual nature, and
it encompasses local practices and global, social, and
political ordering.
incorrect ways of doing things that sought to maximize and
balance our actions for practical reasons, and these ways
have served us well in the past.
Whether these ways of being and acting in the cosmos, on
our planet Mother Earth, can continue to sustain us is the
kernel of the contemporary question of human and planet
sustainability for indigenous and non-indigenous science
alike.
During most of the twentieth century, scientists wanted
to maintain that they simply “did science” and no moral
judgments were involved in that process (i.e., that the doing
of science was “value free”). The idea was that the way
something appeared to be, or was described, was held by
some as simply a matter of scientific determination, and that
such judgments were devoid of moral (ought) significance.
Over time this idea eventually began to unravel, thanks to
work in the philosophy of science. Not only were scientists
susceptible to making value judgments in the practicing of
their science, but all scientific judgments were made from
a sense of doing things the way those who directed the
scientists thought they ought to be done to serve their own
hegemonic purposes.
Science had to face the reality that an overriding human
element of moral control operates in the practice of science
and recognize that some actions thought to be value neutral
were harmful. They were harmful because they precluded
sustainability and thus harmed our human environments of
survival, and in tandem, all our relations.
Indigenous practices are born from interactivity with
indigenous cosmologies; geographically located human
origin stories; spiritual, ecological, and psychological states
of ill and wellbeing; and indigenous understandings of
our human place among all our relations in the world as
we know and understand it from our human vantage point
of reflection upon our experiences. Alongside the more
practical knowledge applications of ecological stability and
sustainability, we have also developed rule guiding, or moral
sensibilities, that guide how we respect all our relations for
the sake of interactive physical and psychological survival
and wellbeing for all.
That there may be choices about how we, as humans,
interact with and come to understand all our relations of
the universe, and that some of these choices could create
nonsustainable environments became an important moral
theme of several American Philosophical Association
conferences in North America. During the 1980s academic
discussions about value neutrality of Western science
challenged a politics of a valueneutral science. Science was
employed in political projects that backed free enterprise
of unjustified accumulations of value, while it created
unsustainable conditions in our human environment. That
there may be a choice of how we decide, or do not decide,
to sustain humanity, our environment, and all our relations
became a hot issue among philosophers working in areas of
philosophy of science and social and political thought. They
also became hot issues in global indigenous communities
that empowered the challenge of Western science’s notions
about value-neutral science.
In tandem, then, our knowledge of sustainability and
our moral sensibility brings us a moral Native science of
sustainability. Because Native science has not developed
independently of our moral sensibilities, we act within other
organizational principles of pragmatic survival that assist all
our relations. We have had to learn to act so as to survive,
sustain, and allow for the survival and sustaining of all our
relations because our traditional indigenous knowledge
has led us to believe we are indeed all related and, hence,
all interdependent in our universe as we know it. For
though the cosmos be beyond our historical imagination,
we developed intuitive cognitive structures of correct and
It was in this historical context that it was theorized that
the sustainability of humanity, and all our relations, may
not be so much a function of biological superiority (à la
Darwin, etc.), but of human choices regarding a sociology
of economics and politics that led us to the current
sustainability crisis. Traditional indigenous leaders began
conversations with Western scientists about the lack of value
neutrality of scientific practice, and the results are just now
beginning to make a difference. Indigenous knowledge,
i.e., traditional indigenous localized knowledge as science,
is helping Western science to better understand the role
of individuals and communities in sustainability practices.
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More, indigenous social and political theory also questions
the imbalance of survival tools in a hegemonic urban
culture that contributes to a lack of sustainability among
local communities, whether rural or urban.
This opening of the scientific dialogue, driven by
environmentalists and traditional indigenous philosophers,
came to dominate the dialogue of some philosophers
of science who were people of conscience in the late
twentieth century. And questions of this movement,
questions about how certain societal practices determine
our ability to sustain humanity and all our relations, remain
with us today. And, as I mentioned earlier, sustainability
questions cannot simply be kicked around to wait for the
next generation to solve them. Moreover, we already have
the tools and knowledge to solve many of these practical
problems now, if proper focus can be maintained.
For indigenous science, this turn, this understanding
of how values influence scientific practice, meant that
Western science might begin to appreciate how traditional
understandings of how and why indigenous science is led
by values of respect for all living entities and a balance
among all our interdependent relations. Importantly, when
some philosophers of science ceased to ignore traditional
indigenous knowledge, they pushed the envelope of
reflecting upon science as academic sacred text and opened
the crevice by which traditional indigenous philosophers
of science could begin a dialogue with them about native
science and all our relations. The devastation of ecological
changes made the dialogue even more important and
timely in the postmodern universe. And today, this dialogue
continues among what has come to be known as “Western
thought” and “traditional indigenous knowledge”—both
together presenting human philosophies of science so
necessary to human sustainability on Mother Earth in our
universe.
C. WESTERN AND INDIGENOUS SCIENCE
That the pragmatic line of North American philosophical
thinking finds its apex in scientific reasoning seems to me
to be in consonance with American indigenous thought
finding its apex of reasoning in preserving and maintaining
a balance of sustainable practices. Of course, one never
knows for sure how one’s thinking about a problem will
change as things relevant to the project may change,
including ontological, metaphysical, or cosmological
information, and such things as climactic shifts (caused
by events within, around, and outside of our immediate
earthen environment). Nonetheless, this pragmatics of
practice as presenting an apex of reasoning for what we
call “Western science” (Western Science Knowledge) and
“native science” (Traditional Indigenous Knowledge) can
assist and sometimes come to complement one another.
Thus, for example, questions about issues we may have left
out of our theorizing about any particular climactic change,
including traditional localized indigenous knowledge of
sustainable practices, and our interdependencies with
fauna and flora, may create new explanatory power of
theory. This may be accomplished via a process of mutual
interjection of concepts from one paradigmatic science to
another. (I believe this theoretical approach is supported by
the recent work of Kyle Powys Whyte, as mentioned earlier.)
SPRING 2016 | VOLUME 15 | NUMBER 2
Simply put, as we blend traditional indigenous knowledge
(Native science) and Western science knowledge (Western
science), a new millennium of an epistemology of scientific
knowledge will emerge that engenders both localized and
Western universalized principles of sustainability.
An epistemological openness to understanding our
survival place in the cosmos means that we, as among
all our relations, over thousands of years, learn localized
information and practices to apply to particular geographical
or climactic regions. These localized knowledge bases
have enabled survival of our species over time. Rather than
talk about what we humans “believe to be true according to
scientific principles,” indigenous epistemology turns upon
an “openness to informative guiding realities of localized
experience” that make assertions about the world. These
localized realities continue to aid humans to assess
practical and sustainable living solutions. The openness of
this indigenous epistemology of assertion is positive in the
sense that there is always an opening to adjust or change the
practical as well as a theoretical base of belief and practice
according to the needs of the community; where the use of
the term “community” does include all our relations within
our cosmos as we know it, and the term “needs” means a
necessary balance that enables sustainable life.
Two recent philosophical movements or philosophical
developments, namely, pragmatism (logical science) and
existentialism (phenomenological science), interactively
gave rise to a wave of questions taken up by environmental
philosophers. These have included questions about the
social and political bases of ontological theories and
positions as well as questions about the interaction of
those ontological theories with metaphysical theories that
reinforced political theories that maintained hegemonic
international relations among nations. These political
inquiries led to questions about how these ontological and
metaphysical theories supported a political governance of
global economic and environmental theories that affected
human sustainability on our planet and in the cosmos.
It is important to understand how contemporary global
hegemonic relations empower some individuals and
nations over others through the use of science. It is also
important to understand how our philosophical historicity
of our time enables us to face the challenges of human
survival today, interdependently with all our relations, while
seeing on the human horizon hints of an environmental
survival balance in the universe.
D. TRADITIONAL INDIGENOUS (NATIVE) SCIENCE
Indigenous localized geographical elder knowledge
can supplement theorizing about sustainability among
nonindigneous
societal
groups,
whether
among
physicists, biologists, psychologists, economists, or any
other specialized area of study. Indigenous localized
geographical elder knowledge can do so precisely because
they do something contemporary scientific theories
cannot do—i.e., they can “fit” together information about
our environment with our wellbeing. They can do so by
continuing to learn and teach interactive ways of being with
and among “all our relations” that have proven success
records. A mutual transfer of knowledge bases from many
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cultures can enhance human understandings of our world,
our imaginative theories, and our human places within
the “all” that simply “is” to us and “with us” as presented,
however that “i”’ may appear to be presented to us, or
appear to be taken in by us, via interpretations, or learned
contexts of our life being, as we hope to sustain ourselves
on Mother Earth. (Kyle Powys Whyte’s work has discussed
the importance of cultural context groups in his examples
of Karuk, Lake Sturgeon, and other communities and has
also provided many examples of governance values of
indigenous knowledges).
There seems to be no unjustified indigenous knowledge
sovereignty as to sustainable practices. The sovereignty
of knowledge is found in its application. It worked in the
past, or worked somewhere else, and its justification for
experimental usage is found in its ability to adequately
address the sustainability issue at hand. In this sense
indigenous knowledge is pragmatic. But it is more.
Different global indigenous communities hold stories of
the historicity of human experience and couple this with
information about what is happening currently to arrive at
planning steps to take to lessen catastrophic disaster among
divergent groups. Among indigenous communities, many
live outside the normal boundaries of artificial normalized
urban citystates and do not have easy access to cultural
“city” resources, hence local scientific creativity abounds,
from archeoastronomy to topographic to psychological
sciences.
We indigenous communities need to, are beginning to, and
continue to remember, reconstruct, assemble, exercise,
improve, and transmit in our indigenous communities, and
among all our relations, our experiences and practices of
sustainability. This is done in tandem with bringing together
indigenous ideas with “modern science and religion”
only in ways meaningful to a particular community. What
is important to a northern community may, however, also
affect a southern community, and in this we are connected.
In this way we carry on an indigenous value of information
sharing and communal concern for sustaining our cultures,
our humanity. This has been the message of one of my own
mentors, Vine Deloria, Jr. (see any number of his some34
published books), and indigenous science leaders such as
Gregory Cajete and others too numerous to mention here.3
This message of interdependence practiced via information
sharing is important. More, it is critical because localized
indigenous knowledges hold vast amounts of information
for sustainability in localized places, both in terms of
food and shelter sustainability and governance survival.
Sometimes this knowledge can be partly incorporated
into other regions. The importance of understanding
rice cropping, for example, and many other types of
food sourcing as well as understanding ancient and
contemporary confederacy relations among many nations
developed toward the purpose of cooperative sustainability
of cultures through respect and common goals has much
to inform us about ways of being in the world that might
assist contemporary cultures to balance (or locate harmony)
with all our relations. In other words, daily practices and
economic and political organizations, all function together
on this continent, at least, via confederacies and cultural
PAGE 12
sustainability practices to harmonize and balance cultural
practice to sustain oneself and community.
There are many informational models used to help humans
achieve sustainability on our Mother Earth via creating and
maintaining balance within our families, communities,
and all our relations. But for individuals and communities
of common interest, understanding practical food and
water source of sustainability, alongside the politics of
sustainable relations, among all our relations, may perhaps
be found most important by asking the central question
of a geographical localized area: “Is life sustainable here,
now, for our community?” Answers to the “here” and “now”
of this query are serious factors that will lead to localized
indigenous knowledge within a particular geographical
area. This is because what works, for example, to grow
food in the soil of New Mexico will not be the same as that
required in Florida, or the Appalachia, or other places that
grow most of our human diet in North America. And so the
question of localized indigenous sustainable knowledge
can begin by asking these essential queries, followed by
seeking the reason why such sustainable practices of food
and/or shelter gathering, and political social communities
of sharing, are simply no longer operative for many. And,
of course, one might hope that seeking answers to these
questions would lead to understanding what needs to be
done to sustain us all within in our cosmos.
Sustainability then, is a question for everyone and can
be furthered by sharing localized information that “fits”
the character and perspective of a group of persons in a
particular place and time on Mother Earth or in the cosmos.
Understanding that the future of humans will require
cooperation of local indigenous scholars and philosophers
(not necessarily academics or Ph.D.s) alongside local urban
and rural scientists of many nations if we are to continue
a human culture that respects localized indigenous
knowledges. For it will ultimately be the understanding that
it is our differences, our geographical peculiarities of how
and why we do things differently, rather than our sameness
of practices, that enable us to survive and sustain ourselves
in any particular locality of economic, political, or climactic
changes, because localized human beliefs and practices
of agriculture and medicine, for example, reside in those
particularized geographical locales. The fruits of localized
knowledges and practices (for example, of agriculture
or medicine) can be imported and exported globally,
or throughout the cosmos, in time. But they can only be
“homegrown” and created and developed in their own
ecologically complex localized environment. Indeed, the
laboratory of Western science is but one locality among
many localities throughout history.
More, if an economic governance system fails sustainability,
or if an ecological disaster tears asunder a communal
sustainability, it may be the diversity of practice alongside
an openness of diverse beliefs about those practices, not
the sameness of many cultures, that will survive to assist
another group to diversely sustain itself in a different
localized geography. And this difference, created by
difference of climactic and topographical locale, may mean
the ultimate difference between human survival or not.
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E. BUEN VIVIR (GOOD LIFE), VIVIR BIEN (LIVING
WELL)
The last concept I want to say something about today is
the sustainable movement of buen vivir, or good life.
Concepts of buen vivir have been organizing principles
of constitutional reforms in Equador (2008) and Bolivia
(2009). I believe this is one of the most important political
movements taking place today, that it is an ontologically
relevant movement, and that it is happening on a global
scale. This Latin American indigenous movement of buen
vivir has the potential to transform an economy that is
devastating our planet, Mother Earth, into a cooperatively
human environment of balance and sustainability
among all our relations. Notions of buen vivir have been
successfully employed by indigenous scholars and
activists, as developed in the Americas of Latin America, as
a response to climate change challenges and protection of
our interdependent environment.
Because how we respond to climate change will determine
our ability to continue sustainable human culture, there is
perhaps no more important issue for science at this time.
In this context economics and related social, racial, ethnic,
and cultural religious practices need to be examined in
relationship to and in light of sustainability challenges.
Buen vivir, as a concept of valuing a harmonious balance
among all ecological systems, offers an ancient paradigm
that has been revitalized in response to contemporary
ecological crises. Buen vivir, if viewed as a paradigm of a
scientific worldview, can be assistive in reinforcing models
of an ethics of balance, of respect, interconnectedness,
and interdependency with all our relations. Developing the
“how” of how we ethically approach our ontological and
metaphysical interdependent relations of our universe and
cosmos and translating these relations into actionoriented
practices that respect all life is at the heart of buen vivir.
Buen vivir holds out that ontological and metaphysical
understandings of our relations with all being in our
environment is fundamental to taking pragmatic action in
an effort to restore balance in our universe as we know it.
Buen vivir requires a shifting from a mandate of what
some refer to as “Western” values of accumulation of
resources for some at the expense of others who lose
rights to autonomous living of self determination. This
shift is toward a redistributive power scheme that seeks
to balance relations and those things needed for survival
of humans and all our relations of the cosmos via respect
for the rights of all to selfdetermine their existence,
including plants, animals, and both seen and unseen
entities. In this sense issues of sustainability, as they relate
to climate change, become issues that require a change of
value, ethic, and politic as to how we approach respectful
interactions with all our relations in the cosmos. It is about
how we allow selfdetermination and individual autonomy
to flourish amidst cooperative interdependent being with
all our relations as we adapt by interacting with diverse and
localized knowledge in the world as we know it.
IF we can understand our planet, Mother Earth, as sacred
because our mother gives and sustains life as we know it,
and IF we can understand humans, as we are so constituted
SPRING 2016 | VOLUME 15 | NUMBER 2
as part of all being, and all being as a part of us, ever in
motion and ever responding to challenges of our abilities,
to sustain human life in such an ever changing environment,
as also always in motion and change, just as our universe
changes, THEN we can name indigenous science as a
sacred challenge, a sacred task, and a sacred hope. Sacred
localized science can assist sustainability projects globally.
Some say that humans need to practice principles of
buen vivir (good living), or vivir bien (living well) if we
are to continue living on Turtle Mother Earth. Living well
is not about politics of governmental relations; it is about
relations among all being, among waters, dirt, sand, rocks,
fauna and flora, and all other forms of living entities on our
planet and within our cosmos.
Living well requires that if our sea levels rise, it means we
must relocate and adapt to new economic mores and new
ways of culture and being in and of the world. It also means
that we must be open to assisting other forms of life when
their sustainability is threatened, most importantly, out of
respect for human interdependence, for in this we are all
related.
Sometimes climate change and sustainability measures run
hand in hand, like when the only sustainable way to adapt
to a new location means significant diet and production
changes, and thereby loss of traditional work patterns
and associated rituals that tie into a larger ontological and
metaphysical cosmology. It also means understanding
that at the same time there will be loss with required
adaptability; new ways of being will arise in response to the
challenges brought on by the need to sustain a community.
It is our task, as a human task, to ensure that when we
assist communities in adapting to climactic or sustainability
challenges, we preserve rather than upset or disrupt the
stewardship balance that surrounds and envelops us.
Some ways of practicing living well include awareness
of ourselves as a small part of this planet’s interrelated
being, understanding the interconnectedness and
interdependence of all our relations, and respecting the
power of diversity in the creative cooperation of our cosmos.
For indigenous nations in the Americas, this means that we
need to remember and continue to teach our ancient ways
of sustainable living, whether by interacting with the fish of
the seas, oceans, and gulf waters, the corns and beans of
traditional earthen farming, the herds of fourleggeds still
yet on the plains, or the rice fields surrounding the Great
Lakes. It means that those principles of learning to live in
accord with different climates and species different from
humans have served our purposes of survival well and have
served the purposes of maintaining a balance of resources.
It also means our children can learn the invaluable gifts
of their ancestors on all continents and from all cultures
as they are today being revived and passed down by
indigenous scholars, including scientists and philosophers
and practitioners globally. Kyle Powys Whyte reminds us
that we are not a few, nor are we alone in the efforts to
sustain our traditional lifestyles and values, but we do
exist in the context of preeminent sovereigns whose
adaptations to climate change and sustainability may differ
from our own needs. As such, we must remember that
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although we have different social and economic systems,
our survival is linked to the survival of all humanity and all
our interdependent relations, and in this we must adapt to
challenges of sustainability. Whyte tells us the challenges
are many:
Indigenous peoples encompass the 370 million
persons globally whose communities exercised
systems of selfgovernment derived from their
own cosmologies before an ended or ongoing
period of colonization. Indigenous peoples now
live within areas where states, like Australia or
Canada, are recognized internationally as the
preeminent sovereigns (Anaya 2004). Like other
communities, indigenous peoples must adapt to
climateinduced ecological variations like sea
level rise, glacier retreat, and shifts in the habitat
ranges of different species.4
As an ontologist writing about “what is,” my work attends
to nuances of belief systems that permeate different
metaphysical systems. Metaphysical systems are
merely organizational structures of ontological relations.
Ontological systems help us to see what we see (and fail
to see), understand what our conceptualizations can put
together, can theorize about (explain) and make rational
(or sometimes irrational) decisions based upon that
ontological system. Those systems and the relations they
entertain are a function of a history of particular human
experience in particular locales. They are generational and
they are grounded in cultural experience passed through
generations. These relations “bathe” our experiences
and help us to make sense of our lives. When faced with
crisis, we employ our creative imaginations and reach for a
difference that can change that crisis. In this way creative
difference guides our survival strategies. And when we
think about sustainability on planet Earth, difference is what
we will need to call upon to enable our creative solutions
that must be found and developed.
An emerged paradigm of sustainable scholarship is a
unified notion that “all my relations” are woven together
as an intricate web of Being. Such ontology shows on
its sleeve how metaphysical systems affect how we
understand humans as being “of” the world while at the
same time “in” the world, and how this reflection bears out
the pragmatics of our decisions, decisions that affect our
community survival. I have thought much about how settler
metaphysical systems influence indigenous community
responses to global climate and sustainability issues. More
comparative cultural metaphysical work is ahead of us, and
this will hopefully lead the way to sustainable solutions of
human existence among all our relations.
I have recently finished an extensive review of the
indigenous Aztec metaphysical system presented in Aztec
Philosophy: A World in Motion (James Maffie, University of
Colorado, 2014). This review was published in the spring
2015 edition of the American Philosophical Association
Newsletter on Indigenous Philosophy.5 This work, Aztec
Philosophy, is partly about sustainability of life, all our
relations, and the cosmos. Aztec thought focuses on issues
of global sustainability, both as daytoday community
PAGE 14
survival as seen in recordings, and as communities that
respond to global climactic change and challenges of the
universe as they (Aztec) see and record it.
The social and political concept of buen vivir (good living)
and the new Ecuadorean constitutional “Rights of Nature”
(protection of human and all our relations ecological habitat)
are in keeping with an Aztec indigenous metaphysical
system. It is my hope that this ancient way (Equadorian)
of thinking about things and our human place in the world
can make a significant contribution to philosophy and other
disciplines. It can tease out implications of philosophical,
legal, economic, political, and scientific work; this can be
accomplished if we use principles of buen vivir as applied
to the rights of nature, with whom we are interdependent. I
anticipate this emerging philosophy and law of indigenous
Ecuadoreans can help articulate a dialogic scholarship
that will engender a greater sustainability for humanity—a
sustainability that can better preserve all our relations of
our cosmos into the future.
Sustainability research clearly affects dominant populations,
local indigenous communities, and the interactions of
both. Pivotal issues affect Native American, American, and
global indigenous and nonindigenous survival. Again,
some specific issues of concern are climate changes of
raised water levels, drought, and water shortage. There is
a serious lack of improved water (82 percent of rural areas
have none), 750 million people (1 in 9) lack access to clean
water, 840,000 people die of unsafe water per year (one
child per minute), and the lack of sustainable ecosystems
(women and children spend 140 million hours a day
collecting water).6
Sustainable issues also include yet unknown effects of
fracking, the practice of digging deep holes into the
earth to search for oil and natural gas. Sustainability is
about our ability to preserve or develop environmental
natural resources and about a developed response
to the climactic changes causing sea level rises, river
shifts, changed farmland conditions, glacier retreat, oil
spills, shifting grazing conditions, and weather patterns
affecting fauna and flora. It is about the many ecological
disturbances or imbalances that threaten the sustainability
of human lifestyles that were previously in harmony
with the environment. Many tribal nations have already
begun community action for sustainability when we learn
to live with climate changes. Some cultures have had to
move inland as their land disappears and a community
infrastructure disappears with it. With shifting populations,
cultures are challenged to learn new ways of adjoining
cultures. Learning how to understand and apply pragmatic
notions such as buen vivir to perceive human place, value,
and responsibility is but one acting agent in a series of
interrelated and interdependent actions, offering an
ontology of value to both our local and global communities.
Hopefully, this ontology of value will assist in solving some
problems of sustainability that we now face and will face in
the future. This ontology is an important contribution from
the Indigenous Americas.
As I mentioned before, issues of sustainability are
closely tied to selfdetermination and sovereignty. One
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APA NEWSLETTER | INDIGENOUS PHILOSOPHY
exploratory goal of continued sustainability research can
explicate and apply these nuanced relationships of self
determination and sovereignty in the context of buen vivir
and rights of nature, as has been done in Equador and
Bolivia, in other governmental contexts. Linking together
indigenous metaphysical sustainability theories with self
determination will continue to be a challenge, and can be
assisted by concentrated academic and community support
and accepting environments for these metaphysical and
ontological philosophies.
Questions of sustainability for humans and all our relations,
again, need to be asked at localized levels. Individuals
need to know whether their current lifestyle is going to be
affected, say, by a water crisis, when, for example, “the
water crisis is the #1 global risk based on impact to society
(as a measure of devastation), and the #8 global risk based
on likelihood (likelihood of occurring within 10 years).7 The
answer to this waters crisis question is “it depends.” What
it depends on is how our global community reacts to the
current water crisis.
Some may ask, “Can I sustain my own lifestyle if I grow
my own food and make my own shelter?” The answer is
that it depends. Yes, of course, you can grow tomatoes in
your garden, but where will the water come from? And,
of course, you can dig out a home in a large rock, but,
again, where would your water come from? In my lifetime
I remember well drinking water from a tap, even from any
neighbor’s hose lying about their yard. But now I must
drink only water of a certain type, of a certain composition.
Without this water, I become ill and unable to have proper
organ function. How many others will be in this place as we
face a serious global risk in the next ten years?
Is life sustainable for you now, where you are? Can
Appalachian or Aztec traditional farming techniques
assist human sustainability on planet Earth? Can those in
Australia? or Africa? Again, it depends, and it depends upon
whether science will understand not only that but how
it is that we are all related, how we are interdependent,
and how although we can imagine selfdetermination, we
are, ultimately, creatures of nature, of habit and creativity,
of reciprocal and complementary community, and of
balanced though sometimes strained interactions, among
all my relations.
F. POEM
On Sustainability, Self Determination, and Survival
My dear sisters and brothers
of Ecuador
My dear brothers and sisters
of Bolivia
All dear indigenous scholars of the Americas
and on all continents
Thank you
for your sacred indigenous philosophy.
SPRING 2016 | VOLUME 15 | NUMBER 2
What is good for everyone? For all our relations
For all our relations today?
That is what you have called us together
to talk about.
This is what you must use to challenge.
Someone has created hegemonic relations
of an hierarchical ontology
holding humans at the peak of value
and all other of our relations
at the bottom rung of metaphysical value
and these values have made
a difference of survival.
But now it has been shown by you
your indigenous sisters and brothers
your nonindigenous brothers and sisters
that the hierophants of the hierarchy
is not humans having all encompassing value
that all others of our relations must
bow before the selfproclaimed decision makers.
For all my relations now have
inalienable rights, legal standing,
and a voice in matters of decision making
about their/our survival.
Inalienable rights, they say
All trees have standing, they say
and inalienable rights, they say,
to exist without human decision
made against their survival.
The measure of
the trees’ rights
are a matter of consequence
when consequences mean what is best
for planetary survival,
understanding this planet
Mother Earth, turtle’s back
is to be preserved not at all cost
and by all means necessary
but through respecting
inalienable rights
of all relations—of all entities.
Then by precept the question of what is good
for everyone, as it is for all our relations
Becomes that which is good for all
for all our relations to survive
And is no longer that which is good for the
corporate or family profit mark
to determine survival of a forest,
a tree, a community, a person.
And so I take a moment today
to thank our elders
for their good living
for the living well
for their teachings, and
for preserving their knowledge,
as we look to the day
when our marks of science will spread
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APA NEWSLETTER | INDIGENOUS PHILOSOPHY
to other nations
to be enacted as liberating
for all our relations interdependently
to help us survive.
1. Gloria Anzaldúa’s writing: put your shit on the paper
alma entre dos mundos, três, cuatro,
me zumba la cabeza con lo contradictorio.
Estoy norteada por todas las voces que me
hablan simultáneamente.
NOTES
1.
Vine Deloria, Jr., Introduction to American Indian Thought:
Philosophical Essays, ed. Anne Waters (WileyBlackwell, 2003),
xvi.
2.
Kyle Powys Whyte, “What Do Indigenous Knowledges Do For
Indigenous Peoples?” Draft paper published on academia.edu
on website of Kyle Powys Whyte, Michigan State University, 2015,
p. 8. http://www.academia.edu/11293856/What_do_Indigenous_
Knowledges_do_for_Indigenous_Peoples
3.
See Gregory Cajete, Native Science: Natural Laws
Interdependence (Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light Books, 1999).
4.
Kyle Powys Whyte, “Indigenous Women, Climate Change Impacts,
and Collective Action.” Hypatia 29, no. 3 (Summer 2014).
5.
Anne Schulherr Waters, “Ontology Matters! A Review of Aztec
Philosophy: A World in Motion, by James Maffie,” APA Newsletter
on Indigenous Philosophy 14, no. 2 (2015): 11–17.
6.
“Global Water Crisis: Water and Sanitation Facts,” water.org,
Available at http://water.org/watercrisis/waterfacts/water/
7.
As announced by the World Economic Forum, January 2015. See
http://water.org/watercrisis/waterfacts/water/
of
El Mar Does Not Stop at Borders: Gloria
Anzaldúa
Larissa Couto Rogoski
SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSIT Y, C ARBONDALE
Anzaldúa writes that she believes in an organic writing,
a writing that is a living tissue and involves all of your
body, mind, and experience. The meaning of her writing
is complete nakedness, to be completely herself. To read
Anzaldúa, it is necessary to read ourselves, to create a
connection between myself (the reader) and the text (this
explicit nakedness by Anzaldúa). Her writing is expository,
open, and philosophical/literary. Understanding Anzaldúa
is complex because it is to be between meanings and
metaphors. Her text is literary: she writes poems; quotes
songs; explains her epistemology; explains the world’s
metaphysics; utilizes concepts like mestiza, woman,
chicana, frontera, et cetera, with a complexity such that
we know that it is poetry and philosophy, and it is on the
border.
Is there such a thing as a philosophical style? It would be
impossible to answer this question without answering what
philosophy is. Anzaldúa is not worried about being clear
and limiting her thoughts inside an established thinking
or philosophy. This paper will argue that Anzaldúa is a
philosopher and has a style not so uncommon in the history
of philosophy, and will unfold her concepts while trying not
to reduce her writing to a simple mute text, but rather to
unfold the mystery of her nakedness, as when we observe
an artwork or hear a confession.
PAGE 16
– Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera
Michel Foucault, in the essay “Self Writing” (1997), describes
the ethopoietic writing in Latins such as Marcus Aurelius,
Seneca, Plutarch, et cetera. One example is Epictetus, who
saw the “meditation” as an “exercise of thought on itself
that reactivates what it knows, calls to mind a principle, a
rule, or an example, reflects on them, assimilates them,
and in this manner prepares itself to face reality.”1 Plutarch,
as Foucault says it, on the other hand understood the
ethopoietic:
As an element of selftraining, writing has, to
use an expression that one finds in Plutarch,
an ethopoietic function: it is an agent of the
transformation of truth into ethos. This ethopoietic
writing, such as it appears through the documents
of the first and the second centuries, seems to
have lodged itself outside of two forms that were
already well known and used for other purposes:
the hupomnemata and the correspondence.2
The hupomnemata was more than a notebook that helps
the memory to remember something that has been read,
heard, or thought; it was a writing to help with actions, to
face reality, or, as Plutarch writes, to “transform truth into
ethos.”3 Foucault writes that the “aim of the hupomnemata:
to make one’s recollection of the fragmentary logos,
transmitted through teaching, listening, or reading, a
means of establishing a relationship of oneself with
oneself, a relationship as adequate and accomplished as
possible.”4 This writing was a means to calm down the soul,
because “[t]he hupomnemata contribute one of the means
by which one detaches the soul from concern for the future
and redirects it toward contemplation of the past.”5
This writing style that is a union of reading, experience, and
thoughts is not new in philosophy, as Foucault reveals to us
about the Latins and ethopoietic writing. It is not the goal
of this paper to affirm that Anzaldúa could be compared
with these Latins in a restricted way. But it is possible to
perceive that she would be a “posthupomnemata” who
utilizes her writing to help women to understand their world
and their identity as a possibility for being manifold, as well
as a lot of other concepts about living and action that she
explains through her experience, culture, poems, songs,
life, and reports. She is not worried about a contemplation
of the past as a way that “detaches the soul from concern
the future”; she thinks that a contemplation of the past will
help us to change the future, and that it is necessary to
realize a world that understands the borderland, to blur
it. She explains that “[c]hanging ourselves we change the
world, that traveling El Mundo Zurdo path is the path of
a twoway movement—a going deep into the self and an
expanding out into the world, a simultaneous recreation of
the self and a reconstruction of society.”6
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However, her writing is ethical and concerned with changing
the truths (the traditional concept that Anzaldúa actualized
to “metaphors”) into a new ethos with new “truths,” new
metaphors arising from a new society (Anzaldúa says
that “We preserve ourselves through metaphor; through
metaphor we protect ourselves. The resistance to change
in a person is in direct proportion to the number of dead
metaphors that person carries.”7) where the culture is not
tyranny. Anzaldúa explains:
Culture forms our beliefs. We perceive the
version of reality that it communicates. Dominant
paradigms, predefined concepts that exist as
unquestionable; unchallengeable, are transmitted
to us through the culture. Culture is made by those
in power—men. Males make the rules and laws;
women transmit them. How many times have I
heard mothers and mothersinlaw tell their sons
to beat their wives for not obeying them, for being
hociconas (big mouths), for being callejeras (going
to visit and gossip with neighbors), for expecting
their husbands to help with the rearing of children
and the housework, for wanting to be something
other than housewives?8
These metaphors are constructed to overwhelm those who
do not fit, who are different, who possess a manifold of
metaphors, dead or new (constructed from an exercise of
putting our internal feelings in words, and expecting that
the “reader” can live the metaphors and create their own
new metaphors).
Anzaldúa, meanwhile, writes that it is not easy to be heard,
to possess the voice to create your own speech when
you are not the “men in power.” If you live in the frontera/
borderland, evading the old metaphors that the cultural
tyranny institutionalized, your voice is mute, your body is a
tool, and your feelings do not exist. Anzaldúa writes about
borders:
Borders are set up to define the places that are safe
and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border
is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep
edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined
place created by the emotional residue of an
unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of
transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its
inhabitants. Los atravesados live here: the squint
eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome,
the mongrel, the mulatto, the halfbreed, the half
dead; in short, those who cross over, pass over, or
go through the confines of the “normal.”9
When those that live in borderlands want to speak, they
are treated as queer, something abnormal, an exception.
Your gender is different, your skin so dark, your body is
not made to think but to work, your language is a mix, you
are disorderly, the old metaphor cannot define you, or,
better, defines you as queer, as something different that is
impossible to understand. Anzaldúa shows us, with all her
work, how it is possible to kill those metaphors and create
new metaphors, a new culture (ethos) to live according
to the manifold. Judith Butler explains this subject in
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Anzaldúa’s philosophy (in her “Americanized” view):
One could say that for her, the subject is “multiple”
rather than unitary, and that would be to get the
point in a way. But I think her point is more radical.
She is asking us to stay at the edge of what we
know, to put our own epistemological certainties
into question, and through that risk and openness
to another way of knowing and living in the world
to expand our capacity to imagine the human.
She is asking us to be able to work in coalitions
across differences that will make a more inclusive
movement.10
You can be mestiza; you do not need borders to stop you;
you are this variety of feelings, sounds, experiences, and
thoughts that you can share, learning to make yourself
audible:
Unlikely to be friends of people in high literary
places, the beginning woman of color is invisible
both in the white male mainstream world and in
the white women’s feminist world, though in the
latter this is gradually changing. The lesbian of
color is not only invisible, she doesn’t even exist.
Our speech, too, is inaudible. We speak in tongues
like the outcast and the insane.11
About the difficulty in believing yourself a capable,
thoughtful person who can write and speak by yourself,
Anzaldúa says about her own experience:
How dare I even consider becoming a writer
as I stooped over the tomato fields bending,
bending under the hot sun, hands broadened and
calloused, not fit to hold the quill, numbed into an
animal stupor by the heat.
How hard it is for us to think we can choose to
become writers, much less feel and believe that
we can.
(…) The white man speaks: Perhaps if you scrape
the dark off your face. Maybe if you bleach your
bones. Stop speaking in tongues, stop writing
left-handed. Don’t cultivate your colored skins nor
tongues of fire if you want to make it in a righthanded world.12
La frontera/the borderland is something that you need to
be allowed to cross, or enable itself to cross. You need to
change according to what is necessary, according to how
the “white man speaks.” When the woman wants to write,
to be audible, she can do everything that is expected,
being a good “righthand,” or she needs to live the borders,
sometimes as one who crosses, but many times as one who
is in the border. She is a woman, but not only a woman, and
she is being a woman in a different way than your mother
or sister: she is queer and writes to create new metaphors
that explain herself as human, not queer.
Anzaldúa translates her stories, feelings, and nakedness,
and allows us to understand her writing as something
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respectful. Anzaldúa’s self writing is the creation of her
own memory; it is organic writing because it allows her
to transform her life in voice, complex and painful, but
living to the reader. The world is not a safe place, like
the reader is not always the person that produces a safe
place inside themselves to build experience and transform
writing into living speech—sharing feelings, modifying
metaphors. Power is the big speech, so when you read
a text like Anzaldúa’s and think if you “buy it or do not,”
the path is closed, the text muted, the feelings disappear.
Why? Anzaldúa does not think that you need to buy her
ideas, because her text is that naked body that we observe,
and she invites us to touch, to kill, or to talk with, like the
performer that blurs the border of her own body and her
artwork.
Anzaldúa has many thoughts about life, writing, being a
woman, mestiza, et cetera, but you can try to understand
all of her meanings as philosophy, understanding her
epistemology. But when I say “epistemology,” I refuse
the experience; I could think, but that is not feeling what
it is to be manifold. Thus, the seam of Anzaldúa’s work is
writing being manifold, her style is mestizo, she is all these
tongues (epistemology, poetry, sounds, deities . . .) and
talking about Anzaldúa should be talking with her, and the
work of the reader is (as it occurs with the Latins which
Foucault presented) reading the memories, notes, and
experiences as a confession: a paper transformed into life.
Foucault writes:
The role of writing is to constitute, along with all
that reading has constituted, a “body” (quicquid
lectione collectum est, stilus redigat in corpus).
And this body should be understood not as a
body of doctrine but, rather—following an often
evoked metaphor of digestion—as the very body
of the one who, by transcribing his readings, has
appropriated them and made their truth his own:
writing transforms the thing seen or heard “into
tissue and blood” (in vires et in sanguinem). It
becomes a principle of rational action in the writer
himself.13
Anzaldúa goes beyond this; not only what you read
constitutes a “body,” but all of your experiences:
It makes perfect sense to me now how I resisted
the act of writing, the commitment to writing. To
write is to confront one’s demons, look them in the
face and live to write about them. Fear acts like a
magnet; it draws the demons out the closet and
into the ink in our pens.14
1.1 EL MAR DOES NOT STOP AT BORDERS
I am going to create what happened to me. Only
because living
isn’t tellable. Living isn’t livable. I shall have to
create upon life. And
without lying. Yes to creation, no to lying.
Creation isn’t imagination,
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it’s running the huge risk of coming face to face
with reality.
– Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G. H.
The experience of la frontera/borderland is Anzaldúa’s
leitmotiv. Everyone has a home, a safe place to hide, to love,
to come back, to feel protection. Probably the first home is
the family, the parents’ house, your spot in the world. But,
when you feel queer within your family, home, country . . . ?
Your skin is not the color that it should be, your gender is
a problem, and you are foreign and you feel the loneliness
of being who you are. Anzaldúa always lived en la frontera;
that is central to Anzaldúa’s experience/concept/metaphor
in her texts. But her big issue is emphasizing that we do
not need to cross the border or make the travesía, we can
live inside the border and be an alien—only by being an
alien can Anzaldúa create new metaphors. It is painful, but
by exposing her “queer” and “alien” being she reveals the
path to transforming herself and killing these metaphors—
or became a bridge. She is mestiza, she speaks tongues,
she is “lefthanded,” woman, chicana, writer. Anzaldúa
lived the culturalpolitical border, as she says:
We [chicanos] are a synergy of two cultures with
various degrees of Mexicanness or Angloness. I
have so internalized the borderland conflict that
sometimes I feel like one cancels out the other and
we are zero, nothing, no one. A veces no soy nada
di nadie. Pero hasta cuando no lo soy, lo soy.15
Living in the borderlands, being chicana, utilizing the
writing to kill demons, (re)creating herself from the inside
is the intense organicity of her work. Nakedness is the
necessary experience to find other “clothes,” namely, new
metaphors for healing herself (and society).
Anzaldúa writes about the tradition of the shaman, who
is responsible “to preserve and create cultural or group
identity by mediating between the cultural heritage of
the past and the present everyday situation people find
themselves in.”16 Anzaldúa says that we should be our own
shaman, creating images that alter states of consciousness,
conducting us to selfhealing. Language and her new
metaphors change our belief system, so la curación/
healing is to be in control of your communication, of your
life—“My soul makes itself through the creative act. . . . It
is this learning to live with la Coatlicue17 that transforms
living in the Borderlands from a nightmare into a numinous
experience. It is always a path/state to something else.”18
In the path of “being shaman,” we find religion, archetypes,
poetry, art, and all these places free the soul and imagination
to create new images, new selfimages. Anzaldúa explains:
“In the ethnopoetics and performance of the shaman,
my people, the Indians, did not split the artistic from the
functional, the sacred from the secular, art from everyday
life. The religious, social and aesthetic purposes of art were
all intertwined.”19
Image is important to Anzaldúa because it is the symbol
that we create that matters; one image is thousands of
words, it is a cluster of meanings. Therefore, once again
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it is impossible to understand Anzaldúa’s aestheticethics
without the experience—the body needs to feel the image;
the stories are alive, muteness or deadness does not exist
in the path of the shaman; everything is about the dance
of meanings, the great performance about myself. If we
want to understand Anzaldúa’s aesthetic, we will need to
observe her own work as art, as a huge performance:
My “stories” are acts encapsulated in time,
“enacted” every time they are spoken aloud or read
silently. I like to think of them as performances and
not as inert and “dead” objects (as the aesthetics
of Western culture think of art works). Instead,
the work has an identity; it is a “who” or a “what”
and contains the presences of persons, that is,
incarnations of gods or ancestors or natural and
cosmic powers. The work manifests the same
needs as a person, it needs to be “fed,” la tengo
que bañar y vestir.20
An example of the Anzaldúa’s aesthetic/shamanism is Ana
Mendieta’s artworks. Mendieta was born in Havana, Cuba,
in 1948, and she was sent to live in the United States in 1961
after the alliance between Castro’s factions and Mendieta’s
father turned sour. Her exile informed the development
of her ensuing work; she did not identify with a particular
homeland and adopted various sites for her performances.
About her work, Mendieta says:
My art is grounded in the belief of one universal
energy which runs through everything: from
insect to man, from man to spectre, from spectre
to plant from plant to galaxy. My works are the
irrigation veins of this universal fluid. Through
them ascend the ancestral sap, the original beliefs,
the primordial accumulations, the unconscious
thoughts that animate the world.21
In her artwork Untitled (Body Tracks)22 from 1974, Mendieta,
eliminating the «paintbrush,» is able to use her own body
to control her desired outcome rather than relying on an
objectification of the male gaze as dictator to the female
body, the cultural tyranny of art (righthand). Confronting
Yves Klein’s anthropometric painting from the 1950s
where naked females painted with their bodies under the
instruction of Klein’s own male ego, Mendieta became
instructor and participant in the gesture of her own female
form, of her performance, her image.
Blood is a feminine, primitive symbol; it is both life and
death, and the woman is the being that bleeds and does
not die. Anzaldúa has a poem about this same theme called
La vulva es una herida abierta/The vulva is an open wound.
The blood, the bleeding body is a key to an internal self
discovery, to talk about blood, pain, and birth with the
lefthand could be a start to talking about her (self). As
Anzaldúa’s poem says:
La pica le pica She bleeds 10 días de cada 24 She
watches a chicken, neck wrung, twitch all over the
yard. It bleeds then lays still. Dead. At night she
stays awake to keep death away. Chickens peck
each other when confined in small spaces. She is
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afraid. No not of the blood but of what happens
when someone or something bleeds.23
Mendieta’s works are imbued with symbolism drawn from
indigenous religions such as Santeria (a Cuban hybrid
of Catholicism, West African and Caribbean spiritual
beliefs, archetypal nature imagery, and Mexican funerary
decorations). She believed she had more in common with
indigenous artists than with her contemporaries; she did
not see her work as more emotional and sensual than
interested in formal qualities. Mendieta’s works have plenty
of meaning and symbols and carry her personal mark: the
exile.
Just as Anzaldúa was mestiza and that is the healing and
wound in her work, Mendieta was an exile from Cuba
and lived her life until her tragic death in 1985, and that
could be understood as an invitation to her “shamanism.”
Mendieta’s Silueta Series (Mexico, 1976) is an example
of her organic art. In this series, Mendieta developed a
personal mixture of performance and land art which she
termed “earthbody work” and “earthbody sculptures.”
Her transient landscape interventions, designed to survive
only as photographs, are small in scale and firmly rooted to
her female body. In a statement she wrote about her work
in 1981, she explained:
I have been carrying out a dialogue between the
landscape and the female body (based on my
own silhouette). I believe this has been a direct
result of my having been torn from my homeland
(Cuba) during my adolescence. I am overwhelmed
by the feeling of having been cast from the
womb (nature). My art is the way I reestablish
the bonds that unite me to the universe. It is a
return to the maternal source. Through my earth/
body sculptures I become one with the earth
. . . I become an extension of nature and nature
becomes an extension of my body. This obsessive
act of reasserting my ties with the earth is really
the reactivation of primeval beliefs . . . [in] an
omnipresent female force, the afterimage of
being encompassed within the womb.24
Mendieta and Anzaldúa, it is possible to note, possess
the same understanding of art, or, as Anzaldúa called it,
invoked art: “Invoked art is communal and speaks of
everyday life. It is dedicated to the validation of humans;
that is, it makes people hopeful, happy, secure, and it can
have negative effects as well, which propel one towards
a search for validation.”25 Both Anzaldúa and Mendieta
work in the mundo zurdo/lefthanded world, from inside
the darkness, femaleness, “primitiveness”—opposite from
the righthand world, the “rational.” However, Anzaldúa’s
philosophy is not limited by just one thought, or, it would
be wrong to think that she is not “rational,” as the traditional
division between feeling and rationality tells us. Anzaldúa
believes in a different rationality, a mystical rationality
that is an opening to support the manifold. Talking about
new metaphors, the image that Anzaldúa suggests is the
ocean and the shore. The ocean is the unconscious, the
imagination, the underworld; the shore is rationality, the
reasoning mode. The water is the connection between
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ocean and land. The creative person/artist is as a boat that
traffics between two worlds. Anzaldúa explains that she is
concerned about these realities because her last name,
“Anzaldúa,” is a Basque name where “an” means above,
the spirit; “zal” means the world of soul; and “dúa” is
the bridge.26 Between the ocean and the land we cannot
see the borderland because water sweeps the land with
kindness and bravery. We can walk on the seaside and
have our feet wet and dry; we do not need to decide if we
want to cross the border, we just need to want to walk on
the border—because el mar does not stop at borders, or,
simply become the bridge.
CONCLUSION
Anzaldúa wanted to be this big bridge between countries,
colors, races, genders; she invented a voice for everyone
who has been silenced, every alien in its skin, and all
women who are subdued. She believed that every change
initially is small, centralized in one soul, and takes shape in
individual experience. She wanted to show us, from inside
to out, in her writing how we need to listen, and utilize the
silence to make movement, not slavery; in her writing she
evoked the good and the evil from her life to talk with,
learning to live as building the bridge first between who
they said that she was and who she could be.
The bridge that Anzaldúa talks to us about could be more
real than we imagine. Allow it to talk its language, have its
color, be its gender, to possess its body and do not impose
these for others, but concern it with hearing itself and
transforming itself into something more than a thing, but
a soul embodied in a body that is, itself, a bridge between
inside and outside—in every meaning. Strengthen it until
the point that you can say that it is proud, but with a pride
that is more dignity by itself than a feeling of superiority. To
become the lesbian blackcolor woman who wakes up and
will make your own voice to be heard in your own language
because it is not something else, an alien hidden from
the (sick) normality. Anzaldúa’s writing is that ethopoietic
loaded with soul.
3.
Ibid.
4.
Ibid., 211.
5.
Ibid., 212.
6.
Gloria Anzaldúa, The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader (Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 2009), 49.
7.
Ibid., 122.
8.
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera (San Francisco: Aunt
Lute Books, 1999), 38.
9.
Anzaldúa,Borderlands/La Frontera, 25.
10. Judith Butler, Undergoing Gender (New York and London:
Routledge, 2004), 228.
11. Gloria Anzaldúa, “Speaking In Tongues: A Letter to 3rd World
Women Writes,” This Bridge Called my Back: Writings by Radical
Women of Color (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press,
1983), 165.
12. Anzaldúa, This Bridge Called My Back, 166.
13. Foucault, “Self Writing,” 213.
14. Anzaldúa, This Bridge Called My Back, 171.
15. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 85.
16. Anzaldúa, The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, 121.
17. Coaticlue is to portray the contradictory. It is an Aztec symbol of
the fusion of opposites.
18. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 95.
19. Ibid.,88.
20. Ibid., 89.
21. Ana Mendieta, “A Selection of Statements and Notes,” Sulfur 22
(1988): 70.
22. The performance is available on Youtube at https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=QccOqJ2WG8k
23. Anzaldúa, The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, 199.
24. Text
extracted
from http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/
mendietauntitledsiluetaseriesmexicot13356/textsummary
25. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 89.
26. Anzaldúa, The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, 103, 105.
27. Anzaldúa,Borderlands/La Frontera, 222.
REFERENCES
Pero nunca nos quitarán ese orgullo/ de ser
mexicana-Chicana-tejana /ni el espíritu indio. /
Y cuando los gringos se acaban–/ mira como se
matan unos a los otros–/ aquí vamos a parecer/ con
los horned toads y los lagartijos /survivors del First
Fire Age, el Quinto Sol.27
Anzaldúa, Gloria. The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader. Durham and London:
Duke University Press, 2009.
———. Borderlands/La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999.
———. “Speaking In Tongues: A Letter to 3rd World Women Writers.” In
This Bridge Called my Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. New
York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983.
Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York and London: Routledge, 2004.
NOTES
1.
Michel Foucault, “Self Writing,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth
(New York: The New Press, 1997), 209.
2.
Ibid., 209.
PAGE 20
Foucault, Michel. “Self Writing” In Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. New
York: The New Press, 1997.
Mendieta, Ana. “A Selection of Statements and Notes.” Sulfur 22 (1988):
70.
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