Brian Burkhart

Works

• 2019Indigenizing Philosophy through the Land

  Land as the root of Indigenous being, knowing and valuing – and Western “delocality” as part of colonisation, shown with the help of the trickster Iktomi.

Position

Burkhart uses “locality” as a term of art for the way being, meaning and knowing are rooted in the land: “being-from-the-land and knowing-from-the-land”. Western philosophy, in his account from Thales to Whitehead, has sought abstract and universal concepts that float free of any place. This “delocality” is not neutral. Descartes’s thinking I is a subject without land or culture, Kant’s idea of maturity is defined against a “savage” way of thinking, and Locke’s labour theory of property made Indigenous land appear unowned: concepts framed so that they exclude Indigenous peoples from the outset. With Deloria he treats epistemology, semantics and ontology as rooted in land, and he reads debates in Native studies about authenticity and identity as products of coloniality. His “trickster methodology” uses stories of Iktomi, the Lakota Spider Trickster, and of Coyote to show how a line of reasoning entangles itself in its own web. In environmental ethics he rejects the distinction between intrinsic and instrumental value and proposes an ethics in which value plays no grounding role: right action follows from relations of kinship, and life is understood as “the capacity for kinship”. Locality, he holds, can be ignored but never removed. In a 2017 roundtable on Glen Coulthard he agreed that state recognition reproduces colonial power but argued that the turn from land as relationship to land as property comes from Western concepts of land and being, not only from the state; drawing on Enrique Dussel, he traces the Cartesian ego cogito back to the ego conquiro of the conquest.

Life & context

Brian Burkhart, who has also published as Brian Yazzie Burkhart, is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma with roots in the Jaybird Creek community of north-eastern Oklahoma; he spent many of his formative years in the Indian Wells community on the Navajo Nation in Arizona. His year of birth is not publicly documented. He took his doctorate in philosophy at Indiana University Bloomington. Vine Deloria Jr., whom he names as his mentor and who encouraged him to pursue an academic career, was one of his advisers. His essay “What Coyote and Thales Can Teach Us: An Outline of American Indian Epistemology” appeared in Anne Waters’s collection American Indian Thought (2004). From 2010 to 2018 he directed American Indian Studies at California State University, Northridge; since 2018 he has taught philosophy at the University of Oklahoma, where he was interim director of the Native Nations Center from 2021 to 2023. Indigenizing Philosophy through the Land was published in 2019.

Further main works

• “What Coyote and Thales Can Teach Us: An Outline of American Indian Epistemology” (in American Indian Thought, ed. Anne Waters, 2004)
• Contribution to “Red Pens, White Paper: Wider Implications of Coulthard’s Call to Sovereignty” (Transmotion, 2017)