Indigenizing Philosophy through the Land

Introduction

Burkhart’s book was published in 2019 by Michigan State University Press, with the subtitle “A Trickster Methodology for Decolonizing Environmental Ethics and Indigenous Futures”. Its first part explains why Western philosophy has ignored both Indigenous thought and land, discusses Vine Deloria Jr. and the coloniality of Native studies, and develops ontology and epistemology from Black Elk and the stories of Iktomi. After an interlude in which Iktomi comments on the history of Western environmental ethics, the second part proposes an ethics without value as its foundation, a metaphysics of morality rooted in land and a naturalism of kinship and reciprocity. The central pair of concepts is locality and delocality. Reviewers in Native American and Indigenous philosophy have treated it as a major attempt to bring these questions into academic metaethics and environmental ethics.

Connections

Builds on

• God Is Red1973 · Vine Deloria Jr.