Indigenizing Philosophy on Stolen Lands: A Worry about Settler Philosophical Guardianship

in canada, after the publication of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report on the Indian Residential Schools, universities and town halls have been flooded with questions about how they are going to implement its ninety-four calls to action and how they are going to promote reconciliation on stolen lands.¹ Many universities have taken heed of the call to “Indigenize” their curricula.² The worry remains, however, that the language of reconciliation is empty rhetoric that “metaphorizes” decolonization, rather than responding to the demands of Indigenous communities for self-determination and land back (Tuck and Yang). For example, we might be wary of the Canadian government’s language of reconciliation when it is compatible with police raids against Wet’suwet’en land defenders opposed to the Coastal GasLink Pipeline Project (which prompted the creation of the hashtag #reconciliationisdead on Twitter).³

This paper considers what the activity of “Indigenizing” academic philosophy (and ethics, more specifically) might involve, and envisions philosophy education that is responsive and responsible to land and community.⁴ As a settler⁵ to the Stó:lō territory,⁶ where I currently live and teach, I question what “Indigenizing” ethics might look like in the academy, which is itself an apparatus of colonization.⁷ While I have a vested interest in learning about Indigenous philosophizing⁸ in order to better understand the place where I am (and how this place informs what and how I teach), framing these efforts in terms of “Indigenization” makes it about me and my learning, rather than about listening to Stó:lō elders when they say “S’ólh Téméxw te it’kwelo. Xyólhmet te mekw’ stám ít kwelát” [This is our land. We have to take care of everything that belongs to us].⁹ In other words, I worry that the call to Indigenize philosophy ultimately serves settlers in assuaging settler guilt while leaving structural settler colonial power intact. This echoes Andrea Sullivan-Clarke’s recent concerns that land acknowledgments often become rote and are performed to mark the beginning of the meeting “before ‘the real content’ gets underway” (12). While adding land acknowledgments to the beginning of university events is a helpful reminder to settlers that they are on unceded territory and that Indigenous nations have had a long relationship with these lands, the acknowledgment falls far short of returning land to those communities and nations.

In particular, I contend that the integration of Indigenous philosophy into ethics curriculum might assimilate an understanding of “grounded normativity” into settler understandings of groundless or placeless normativity.¹⁰ Such an assimilation would be an operation of what Brian Burkhart calls “settler philosophical guardianship” (“Groundedness of Normativity” 42). For this reason, I contend that the work of meaningfully “Indigenizing” philosophical curricula must first critically investigate an account of groundless normativity as a function of the settler colonial drive for expansion and elimination.

Indigenous Philosophizing and Locality

A helpful starting point in articulating an account of the role of land in Indigenous philosophizing is Vine Deloria, Jr., and Daniel Wildcat’s 2001 Power and Place: Indian Education in America. They define Indigenous philosophy as philosophy “of a place” (Deloria and Wildcat 31). The emphasis of being “of a place” puts forward an ontology in which place, defined as “the relationship of things to each other,” is an agent (22–23). This means that place, or land, is an active participant in the life of the community. Deloria puts it plainly: “[P]ower and place produce personality” (23). This means that agents or persons are the intersection of power and place, where power names a kind of motivating force and place names the complex network of relations that make agents what they are. A particular person, for example, is generated by a particular place. In this respect, Wildcat affirms that identity—“who one is”—is emergent from place. Sonny McHalsie’s (Naxaxalhts’i) research on how Stó:lō place-names reveal Stó:lō understandings of place and relationships with land supports this claim (Carlson et al. xi–xii). Similarly, the Katzie story of white...