How It Is: The Native American Philosophy of V. F. Cordova

Introduction

Published by the University of Arizona Press in 2007, five years after Cordova’s death, the book was edited by Kathleen Dean Moore, Kurt Peters, Ted Jojola and Amber Lacy from her papers, lectures and unpublished manuscripts, including some poems. It has three parts: the nature of the world and the place of humans in it; the human being as shaped by people and place; and a life of reverence in a world where the sacred and the ordinary are not separated. Cordova contrasts a Native view of the world as a self-sustaining whole with Western dualism and the idea of a creator outside the world. Some reviewers found many pieces fragmentary, but the book is a central reference for Native American philosophy.