Brian Burkhart

This paper surveys four seminal texts of Native American Philosophy from the last decade through the lens of Indigenous intellectual sovereignty. Indigenous intellectual sovereignty is articulated as a complementary dualism that positively negotiates the seeming conflict between the Indigenous intellectual and the connectedness of meaning and value in tribal sovereignty. This complementary dualism of individual and community is seen throughout the highlighted texts. Vine Deloria Jr. and Daniel Wildcat’s Power and Place: Indian Education in America, for example, shows that Native concepts of power and place both unify and individuate. Power not only moves humans individually but also forms the connections and relations of the human community and natural environment. Place is not only individuating in its geographic specificity but also unifying in creating a relational entanglement of everything. Similar examples are highlighted in Anne Waters’ edited American Indian Thought: Philosophical Essays, Viola Cordova’s How It Is, and Thomas Norton-Smith’s The Dance of Person and Place.

Land is key to the operations of coloniality, but the power of the land is also the key anticolonial force that grounds Indigenous liberation. This work is an attempt to articulate the nature of land as a material, conceptual, and ontological foundation for Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and valuing. As a foundation of valuing, land forms the framework for a conceptualization of Indigenous environmental ethics as an anticolonial force for sovereign Indigenous futures. This text is an important contribution in the efforts to Indigenize Western philosophy, particularly in the context of settler colonialism in the United States. It breaks significant ground in articulating Indigenous ways of knowing and valuing to Western philosophy—not as artifact that Western philosophy can incorporate into its canon, but rather as a force of anticolonial Indigenous liberation. Ultimately, Indigenizing Philosophy through the Land shines light on a possible road for epistemically, ontologically, and morally sovereign Indigenous futures.