Anne Waters

Works

• 2004American Indian Thought: Philosophical Essays

  Twenty-two essays by American Indian philosophers, among them Vine Deloria Jr., Viola Cordova and Brian Burkhart, on knowledge, science, being, ethics, law and art, arranged by the fields of academic philosophy; Waters calls it the first such collection by American Indian PhDs in philosophy.

• 2004Language Matters: Nondiscrete Nonbinary Dualism

  Essay arguing that many Indigenous languages of the Americas rest on a “nondiscrete” ontology in which things interpenetrate, so that pairs such as male and female are complementary rather than exclusive; read this way, gender need not be an essentialised category.

Position

Waters is on the map for helping to establish American Indian philosophy as a field of academic philosophy. “American Indian Thought: Philosophical Essays” (2004), which Waters edited, brought together twenty-two essays by American Indian philosophers – among them Vine Deloria Jr., Viola Cordova, Brian Burkhart, Thurman Lee Hester Jr. and Dale Turner – arranged by the fields of the discipline, from epistemology and logic to ethics and aesthetics; Sandy Grande called it a landmark of Native intellectual life, and Burkhart counted it among the four key texts of a decade of Native American philosophy. Waters’ own essays deal with ontology and identity. “Language Matters” distinguishes the “discrete binary dualism” of Western thought since Plato, whose sharply bounded opposites permit hierarchies such as mind over body or male over female, from a “nondiscrete nonbinary dualism” in Indigenous languages of the Americas, in which each term remains itself and is also part of the other; gender, so understood, need not be an essentialised category, and feminist and race theory should take this into account. “Ontology of Identity and Interstitial Being” draws on Deloria’s idea of identity rooted in place and describes American Indian identity not as conformity to a definition of “Indianness” but as a consciousness woven from many meanings in the gaps between imposed categories. The newsletter, the association and the APA committee gave what Waters called the first generation of American Indians in professional philosophy a forum of their own.

Life & context

Anne Waters writes in the dedication of “American Indian Thought” (2004) as “a Seminole woman”; in an autobiographical essay in the same volume Waters describes a family history that includes Seminole, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Cherokee ancestry. Waters took a doctorate in philosophy at Purdue University and a law degree at the University of New Mexico, both in 1992, the year in which Viola Cordova also received a doctorate in philosophy; the two were among the first American Indian women in the field. From 1996 Waters was a driving force behind the American Indian Philosophy Association, as its founding president, and behind the American Philosophical Association’s Committee on American Indians in Philosophy, approved in 1999, of which Waters was a founding member and chair. With Cordova, Waters edited the APA Newsletter on American Indians in Philosophy from 2001. Waters was a research associate at the State University of New York at Binghamton, co-edited a special issue of Hypatia on Indigenous women in the Americas (2003) and the SUNY Press series “Living Indigenous Philosophies”, and has also published poetry.

Further main works

• Indigeneity, Self-Determination, and Sovereignty (APA Newsletter on American Indians in Philosophy 2:1, 2002)
• Introduction: Indigenous Women in the Americas (Hypatia 18:2, special issue, co-ed., 2003)
• Ontology of Identity and Interstitial Being (in American Indian Thought, 2004)