School · 21 thinkers
Indigenous Philosophies
“Indigenous” is the umbrella term used internationally by peoples who count themselves among the original inhabitants of lands later colonised; the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007) uses it without defining it and affirms the right of Indigenous peoples to determine their own identity (Art. 33). The word covers very different peoples, and many prefer their own names or regional terms (Māori, Yankton Dakota, First Nations, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples; in the USA also “American Indian” or “Native American”); where possible, the map names the particular people. In the Pacific it is also used for the peoples of Oceania as a whole, including those of independent island states such as Tonga – which is why the Tongan Epeli Hauʻofa appears here. “Indians” goes back to Columbus’s error, yet “Indian” and “American Indian” are in part also self-designations, used deliberately and in their own sense by Charles Eastman, Vine Deloria Jr., Gerald Vizenor (who writes “indian” in lower case to mark the colonial image) and Fausto Reinaga (“indio”). “Philosophy” is itself a European category that not every community applies to its knowledge; the map mostly shows what was published in writing, often in colonial languages and at universities. Many traditions were passed down orally – a gap in the record, not in the thinking (for example Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, the knowledge handed down among the Inuit).
21 thinkers of Indigenous Philosophies on the Agora star map, from Nezahualcóyotl to Kyle Powys Whyte, in chronological order.
- 1402–1472Nezahualcóyotl
The songs attributed to him ask whether anything on earth is true and lasting – and find in poetry a way toward truth.
- c. 1535–1616Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala
Colonial rule in the Andes is unjust and must be reformed, and Indigenous people are capable of governing themselves well.
- 1858–1939Charles Eastman (Ohiyesa)
As Eastman, himself a Christian, presents it, the religion of his people – generalised in his book to “the Indian” – was a way of life: worship in silence before the Great Mystery, generosity and kinship as sacred duties; a civilisation that preaches Christianity without practising it cannot look down on it.
- 1876–1938Zitkala-Ša
Zitkala-Ša finds the Great Spirit in the land and in the kinship of all living beings and prefers this, even if it is called paganism, to a Christianity of dogma and the fear of hell.
- 1906–1994Fausto Reinaga
The “indio” of Bolivia is not a peasant but a member of a colonised nation; neither the right nor the mestizo left can bring liberation – it must be an Indian revolution, made by the “indios” themselves.
- 1924–1993Māori Marsden
In Marsden’s account the universe is not a collection of things but a woven fabric of processes, unfolding by genealogy from the void and the night into the world of light; mana (power), tapu (the set-apart) and mauri (life force) hold together the kinship of the divine, people and land.
- 1933–2005Vine Deloria Jr.
Native American religions are rooted in sacred places, while Western religions revolve around time and history – and the two cannot simply be merged.
- b. 1934Gerald Vizenor
The “indian” is a simulation, an invention from Columbus to Hollywood that makes real Native people disappear; survivance – active presence instead of tragic victimry – undoes it through stories, irony and the play of the trickster.
- 1937–2002Viola Cordova
Humans are not above the world but part of it, bound to a place and to all other beings, and ethics follows from that relatedness.
- 1939–2009Epeli Hauʻofa
Oceania is not a scattering of tiny islands in a far sea but a sea of islands, a large world joined by the ocean that its peoples have always crossed; calling them small and dependent is a colonial habit of belittlement.
- contemporaryAnne Waters
Waters holds that Western thought since Plato splits the world into sharply bounded opposites that permit hierarchy, while many American Indigenous languages express a nondiscrete dualism in which each term remains itself and is part of the other; gender, so understood, is no fixed essence.
- contemporaryMary Graham
Graham holds that in Aboriginal philosophy land is a sacred entity and source of law, not property; the relation between land and people is the template for all others, and a custodial ethic of obligation and regard for autonomy counters a “survivalist ethos” of rivalry.
- b. 1950Linda Tuhiwai Smith
Research has been one of the instruments of imperialism, classifying, collecting and representing Indigenous peoples; to decolonise it, Indigenous communities must set its questions, control its results and benefit from what it finds.
- b. 1953Ailton Krenak
The “humanity” of development is an exclusive club that has cut itself off from the Earth; to postpone the end of the world we must keep telling stories and keep many worlds alive, with rivers and mountains as kin.
- b. c. 1956Davi Kopenawa
In Kopenawa’s account the forest is alive and held together by the spirits that shamans call; the people of merchandise, digging for metals and spreading epidemics, are destroying it, and if the shamans die the sky will fall on everyone.
- b. 1956Aileen Moreton-Robinson
Settler nations rest on a possessive logic: having taken Indigenous land, they treat the nation, its institutions and whiteness itself as white property, so that Indigenous sovereignty is denied rather than merely overlooked.
- b. c. 1964Taiaiake Alfred
Alfred argues that self-government on the state’s terms binds Indigenous leaders and identities to the colonial state; freedom requires regenerating traditional values – non-coercive authority, autonomy of conscience, the interconnection of all creation – through a non-violent but uncompromising struggle beginning in individuals and communities.
- b. 1971Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
Freedom will not come from recognition by the settler state but from resurgence: rebuilding Indigenous nations on their own terms through land, language and relationships, because learning from the land is itself a form of theory.
- b. 1974Glen Sean Coulthard
Recognition granted by a settler state does not end colonialism but makes the colonised accept its terms; freedom begins with land-based practices and relations that Indigenous peoples maintain themselves.
- contemporaryBrian Burkhart
Meaning, being and knowledge grow out of our relations to the land; a philosophy that cuts them loose from any place excludes Indigenous peoples from the start – and an ethics of kinship needs no ranking of values.
- contemporaryKyle Powys Whyte
For many Indigenous peoples, the dystopia of environmental collapse has already happened through colonialism – so climate justice has to begin by repairing broken relationships.