Notes
Notes 1. Common Themes in American Indian Philosophy 1. “kiwaakomelepwa” is a unique and compelling greeting. The stem or root “waakw-” has the sense of “knowing” or “having knowledge of” (Voegelin 1940: 416). The verb construction is the local animate “ki-ROOT-ele-pwa,” which has the sense of “you (all)-VERB-(to) me.” So the greeting is, literally, “You all are known to me.” The letter “” stands for the phoneme “th” as in “theater.” 2. My use of Nelson Goodman constructivism to explore American Indian Philosophy is not unique; indeed, Jim Cheney beautifully developed the notion of a “ceremonial world” in the spirit of a Goodmanian “reconception” of philosophy , wherein the concepts of truth, certainty, and knowledge are replaced by rightness, adoption, and understanding. Moreover, much that I have to say in my exploration supports—and is supported by—Professor Cheney’s account of Native ethical-epistemology . “So much the better,” observed Lee Hester in correspondence. “Though Jim’s work . . . makes a different use of Goodman, it is also clear that his general points are consonant with yours. . . . The more we agree, the more we are likely to be on the right track.” Although Professor Cheney’s development is breathtakingly elegant, especially in Cheney (2005), I see a problem in his use of Goodman as “a place on our side of the river to begin building the bridge” from the Western tradition to Native ceremonial worlds (Cheney & Hester 2000: 77). Unfortunately, Goodman as we find him cannot span the river, for we will see that his criteria for the ultimate acceptability of a world version excludes non-Western versions—including the kind of Native ceremonial worlds Professor Cheney develops. See also Hester and Cheney (2001). 3. See for example Dale Turner (2006) and Russell (2004). 4. This argument was voiced during a session, sponsored by the American Indian Philosophical Association, at the American Philosophical Association Pacific Division meetings in Albuquerque, NM, in March 2000. 5. The “Indian Problem” is, of course, that there are Indians. 6. Recognizing the inherent difficulties in trusting the interpreted narrative Black Elk Speaks, I am nonetheless heartened by Deloria’s remarks prefacing that narrative: “Present debates center on the question of Neihardt’s literary intrusions into Black Elk’s system of beliefs and some scholars have said that the book reflects more of Neihardt than it does of Black Elk. It is, admittedly, difficult to discover if we are talking with Black Elk or John Neihardt, whether the vision is to be interpreted 141 142 Notes to Chapter 2 differently, and whether or not the positive emphasis which the book projects is not the optimism of two poets lost in the modern world and transforming the drabness into an idealized world. Can it matter? The very nature of great religious teachings is that they encompass everyone who understands them and personalities become indistinguishable from the transcendent truth that is expressed. So let it be with Black Elk Speaks” (Deloria 2000: xvi). 7. I owe much of what I know about the Shawnee language to tribal elder Rick Nightwolf Wagar, and I thank him here. 8. It is interesting to notice that although European languages have gendered third-person singular pronouns and possessives, Shawnee has only “willa,” which functions as either “he” or “she” depending on context. But it would be as daft to suggest that the Shawnee do not recognize gender distinctions as to suggest that English speakers do not recognize the difference between animate and inanimate beings. The point is that the more fundamental distinctions will be the ones encoded grammatically. Shawnee Thomas Wildcat Alford (1936) makes a similar point when explaining why the Shawnee use the pronoun “he” when speaking of Great Spirit, the Grandmother: “The pronoun he is used in speaking of the Great Spirit because there is no feminine gender in the Shawnee language. Men and women are spoken of as of the same gender, only the name of the individual contains the discrimination. Personal pronouns are neither masculine nor feminine, and most of them are mere affixes to other words” (19). 9. This is also consistent with Powell’s (1877) observation that in American Indian cosmology “[t]he sun and moon are always personages” (7). Hallowell (1960) observes a similar notion amongst traditional Ojibwa speakers with respect to the sun, the “day luminary.” In fact, the sun is not only animate, but it is regarded as an other-than-human person (28–29). 10. At a session on American...
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