Cosmologies, coloniality and quantum critique: Exploring conversations with Native American ways of knowing

Abstract

Worldviews provide orientation in the world. They also have worlding power as part of material assemblages within which our responses to political issues are devised. This article turns the gaze inward to “decenter” Western ways of knowing, cosmologies, and stories of the origins of the universe. It questions considering science as a way of knowing completely separated from religious and political thinking and highlights how Western theories of matter became entangled with practices of colonial power. Furthermore, this article argues that by emphasizing uncertainty, relationality, and the relevance of processes of mattering, Quantum Social Theory worldviews challenge the pillars of the onto-epistemologies of the Enlightenment and bring us closer to some elements of Native Peoples onto epistemologies. This piece aims at decentering the ways of knowing of the Empire, building a bridge with non-Western worldviews, and showing that relational onto-epistemological orientations may chang how we engage with other human and non-human beings and how we address political matters.