Native Epistemology Research Articles

Indigenous Research: The Path towards Mapuchization

This article explores the process of decolonizing and indigenizing research from my perspective as a Mapuche woman. During this process, I examine how to approach and analyze colonial and patriarchal archives through an indigenous lens, leading me to consider a transformation of my work into an indigenous research endeavor. In this undertaking, I delve into the interplay of affective and political dimensions within indigenous research, recognizing them as catalysts for resistance and knowledge construction. I emphasize the significance of first-person research as a powerful means of empowering marginalized individuals and validating personal and collective experiences, countering Eurocentric epistemologies that perpetuate colonial and epistemic violence. Furthermore, I advocate for the recovery of marginalized knowledge and the integration of native epistemologies. As a third step in the process of decolonizing and indigenizing my research, I introduce the concept of ‘Mapuchization of research.’ This idea represents a process of reconnection with the ancestral knowledge of my people, where past and present come together. It intertwines several dimensions, including political, epistemological, and ontological, with the aim of contributing to indigenous research methodology, based on the knowledge found in Mapuche culture and history.

Science Fiction and Native Epistemologies

Science Fiction and Native Epistemologies David M. Higgins (bio) Miriam C. Brown Spiers. Encountering the Sovereign Other: Indigenous Science Fiction. Michigan State UP, 2021. xl+143 pp. $39.95 pbk & ebk. Encountering the Sovereign Other argues that Indigenous science fiction approaches encounters with alterity from a richly ethical perspective informed by the spatial and communal grounding of tribally specific Native worldviews. If Euro-American colonial perspectives are often characterized by violent dynamics of abjection that define the self in contrast against an alien Other (and are driven by a spatial bias privileging outward expansion and a temporal emphasis on future-oriented progress), Miriam C. Brown Spiers suggests that tribally informed Indigenous worldviews, in contrast, can enable individuals “to accept the presence of an Other without feeling threatened, without getting swept up in a narrative of Progress and assimilation” (xxxviii). Furthermore, people with Indigenous values may be “more likely to allow lived experiences to inform their decisions, whereas those raised in Euro-American culture are more likely to try to force reality to fit into their preconceived notions of how the world should be” (xxxviii). This is a vital difference, Spiers argues, because it can engender dramatically different responses to encounters with alterity. She observes examples of this in Indigenous science fiction, where Native characters are often “better prepared to accept and respond to elements of cognitive estrangement than their non-Native counterparts” (xxx). When encountering what Darko Suvin describes as the “strange newness” of a science-fictional novum (Suvin 4), for example, Spiers notes that sf characters with conventional Euro-American worldviews “often refuse to acknowledge that a problem exists because it does not fit into their fixed notions of the world; meanwhile, Native characters recognize the presence of a novum, assess its effects on the community, and react accordingly” (xxx). Indigenous science fictions, in other words, envision ethical encounters with sovereign Others, and Native characters can often interact with strange Others in full and mutual reciprocity rather than reducing Others to mere negative reflections of the self. The book’s four chapters each offer close readings of key texts that exemplify this tendency. Spiers first examines The Ballad of Billy Badass and the Rose of Turkestan (1999) by William Sanders, a novel in which a Cherokee Gulf War veteran (Billy) and a Kazakh scientist (Janna) cultivate cross-cultural alliances and affinities in order to defeat a radiation monster summoned by colonialist New Age trash magic. Next, she turns her attention to Stephen Graham Jones’s It Came from Del Rio (2010), which tells the story of a US citizen named Dodd Raines who flees to Mexico after a failed bank robbery and eventually becomes a radiation monster himself after attempting [End Page 111] to smuggle moon rocks across the southern border. Raines’s transformation illuminates the coloniality of both race and citizenship, Spiers argues, and his journey provokes readers to recognize the personhood of Others who are dehumanized as they attempt to cross national boundaries. After this, she offers a reading of Field of Honor (2004) by D.L. Birchfield—a “shukha anumpa” or “Choctaw hogwash” alternate history in which a paranoid Vietnam veteran (Patrick Pushmataha McDaniel) discovers a hidden Choctaw community that has avoided removal to Oklahoma by retreating into underground caverns (49). This community, Ishtaboli, preserves Choctaw custom and heritage, eschews colonialist Euro-American cultural norms, and supports people from other non-Choctaw tribes by recognizing and honoring their unique cultures and traditions. Finally, Spiers concludes with a discussion of Riding the Trail of Tears (2011) by Blake M. Hausman, a story in which digital spirits (known as Little People or Nunnehi) subvert a VR re-enactment of Cherokee removal in order to help the novel’s protagonist (Tallulah) to disrupt the continuing cycle of violence that requires her to perform Native identity for tourists and endlessly repeat a debilitating narrative of Cherokee defeat and victimization. Spiers argues that the novel’s recognition of digital Cherokee as real people “reinforces an Indigenous perspective in which nonhuman creatures are recognized as peoples who are deserving of respect and compassion,” and this encourages readers to “acknowledge the humanity of the Other and respond ethically to the Other’s demand...

Introduction: Indigenizing the Eighteenth-Century American South

This essay introduces the cluster, "Indigenizing the Eighteenth-Century American South," and shows how its contributions embody the ways in which Native American history and its study continue to reshape our understandings of the American South and the eighteenth century more broadly. The most predominant thread connecting the essays is that of gender, specifically how gender roles and contrasting ideas of femininity and masculinity informed and determined the interactions between Native Peoples and Euro-Americans within the eighteenth century South. Another theme running through the cluster is the longue durée, connecting the deep history of the American South and its peoples to the gendered colonialism that continues to shape the lives of Native American communities today. Altogether, these essays push the envelope of scholars' understandings of the American South and the eighteenth century by privileging and recentering Native epistemologies and practices at the heart of their work and reminding scholars of the explanatory power that Indigenous peoples, their histories, and their stories can provide for seeing into the eighteenth-century past.

Indigenous Ontology in Zo Oral Narratives: A Study of the Zo Indigenous Cosmovision

This paper is an exploration of Indigenous ontologies and ways of thinking and worldview that deviates from the Eurocentric critical frameworks that often insufficiently portray or interpret the nature of specific indigenous cultures and native epistemology. The focal point of this study is to explore the indigenous ontology and knowledge found in the folktales and oral narratives of the Zo tribes of Southern Manipur. The Zo’s geo-political state of existence has been in a muddle since colonial times. The territorial demarcation that was done for administrative purposes had caused permanent displacement and obscurity of the Zo Indigenous identity. Colonial ethnographical records that have been perceived as infallible evidences, fall short of impartial facts and accounts. The series of under and misrepresentation of their socio-cultural and political history has narrowed the general interest and scope for the discursive study of Zo indigeneity, whose relevance to the modern world is only confined to their conflict-ridden state of political affairs. Therefore, this study will be carried out in the hope of decolonising and re-aligning the ‘Zo-ness’ through the exploration of the lesser-known indigenous ways of knowledge, philosophies, and worldview found in the reservoir of their oral literature. Zo orality is accentuated by certain indigenous concepts and philosophies that find expression in proverbs, aphorisms, allegorical tales, customary laws, rituals and the folksongs. The paper argues that these concepts are not adequately represented by ethnocentric appreciation, but are elements of indigeneity that deserve specialized set of conceptual introspections

The Phenomenology of a Performative Knowledge System: Dancing With Native American Epistemology

The Phenomenology of a Performative Knowledge System: Dancing With Native American Epistemology

Measuring the Harlem Renaissance: The U.S. Census, African American Identity, and Literary FormOn Sympathetic Grounds: Race, Gender, and Affective Geographies in Nineteenth-Century North America

Measuring the Harlem Renaissance: The U.S. Census, African American Identity, and Literary FormOn Sympathetic Grounds: Race, Gender, and Affective Geographies in Nineteenth-Century North America

Review of The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies by Tiffany Lethabo King (Duke University Press)

In this ambitious first book, Tiffany Lethabo King disrupts what she sees as settler-colonial studies' tendency to privilege the settler/conquistador as the ethical subject of Western theory. To do so, she undertakes the urgent work of considering historical, ceremonial, imaginative, and theoretical ways that Native and Black studies intersect and overlap within the North American context. Drawing in particular upon Afro-pessimism (for instance Frank Wilderson, Saidiya Hartman, Katherine McKittrick, Alexander G. Weheliye, and Sylvia Wynter) as well as Native studies' refusal of sovereignty as a political, ethical, and material formation (Audra Simpson, Glen Coulthard, Jodi Byrd, and Andrea Smith), King joins the likes of Tiya Miles in seeing as insufficient any account of settler colonialism or Western humanism that does not consider how Black and Native epistemologies and histories intersect.

Social-ecological relations among animals serve as a conceptual framework among the Wichi

Although there is now wide agreement that across diverse cultures, taxonomic systems of organization are not necessarily the only prevailing framework for the animal kingdom, evidence concerning alternative frameworks, including ecological frameworks, remains sparse. Here, we begin to fill this gap by examining children and adults from an indigenous Wichi community in the Chaco forest of Argentina. We ask which organizing principles the Wichi invoke when organizing animals native to their forest (tshotoy). The results reveal that Wichi adults and children represent tshotoy primarily on the basis of ecological relations that become increasingly specified from with development. Moreover, the results reveal a pervasive import of social relations. Responses unveil a social-ecological framework that is well aligned with Wichi native epistemology. This new evidence, which underscores the potency of social relations within an ecological framework, also begins to map out a developmental path along which cultural knowledge grows.

The Cognitive Unconscious in Native American Embodied Knowing

In this paper, I address only one small parallel between one subsection of Western epistemology and cognitive theory and Native American epistemology. I draw the connection between the recent theories of embodied cognition and distinctive Native modes of embodied implicit procedural knowing, such as blood memory, vision questions, and non-binary logical systems. My reason for doing so is twofold. First, I show how these distinctive ways of knowing within Native worldviews are not mere mystical claims that can be cast aside in favor of more ostensibly “rational” knowing practices. To do so, I utilized Mark Johnson’s account of the cognitive unconscious to demonstrate how and that Native embodied knowing practices and knowledge sources are easily explicable when examined though a phenomenological cognitive lens. Second, I highlight one small respect in which Native epistemologies are conceived of procedurally. Embodied forms of knowing are merely one facet of the procedural performative nature of Native American epistemology but they are highly demonstrative of the fact that procedural ways of knowing—knowing-how—account for deeply implicit ways of knowing that are lacking from other procedural knowledge accounts that are often hamstrung without such an accompanying account of knowing-how beyond counterfactual knowledge.

Response: Postexceptionalist Puritanism: Rocking the Foundations

Response: Postexceptionalist Puritanism: Rocking the Foundations

Indigenous science (fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral dystopias and fantasies of climate change crises

Portrayals of the Anthropocene period are often dystopian or post-apocalyptic narratives of climate crises that will leave humans in horrific science-fiction scenarios. Such narratives can erase certain populations, such as Indigenous peoples, who approach climate change having already been through transformations of their societies induced by colonial violence. This essay discusses how some Indigenous perspectives on climate change can situate the present time as already dystopian. Instead of dread of an impending crisis, Indigenous approaches to climate change are motivated through dialogic narratives with descendants and ancestors. In some cases, these narratives are like science fiction in which Indigenous peoples work to empower their own protagonists to address contemporary challenges. Yet within literature on climate change and the Anthropocene, Indigenous peoples often get placed in historical categories designed by nonIndigenous persons, such as the Holocene. In some cases, these categories serve as the backdrop for allies' narratives that privilege themselves as the protagonists who will save Indigenous peoples from colonial violence and the climate crisis. I speculate that this tendency among allies could possibly be related to their sometimes denying that they are living in times their ancestors would have likely fantasized about. I will show how this denial threatens allies' capacities to build coalitions with Indigenous peoples. Inuit culture is based on the ice, the snow and the cold…. It is the speed and intensity in which change has occurred and continues to occur that is a big factor why we are having trouble with adapting to certain situations. Climate change is yet another rapid assault on our way of life. It cannot be separated from the first waves of changes and assaults at the very core of the human spirit that have come our way. Just as we are recognizing and understanding the first waves of change … our environment and climate now gets threatened. Sheila Watt-Cloutier, interviewed by the Ottawa Citizen. (Robb, 2015) In North America many Indigenous traditions tell us that reality is more than just facts and figures collected so that humankind might widely use resources. Rather, to know “it”—reality—requires respect for the relationships and relatives that constitute the complex web of life. I call this Indigenous realism, and it entails that we, members of humankind, accept our inalienable responsibilities as members of the planet's complex life system, as well as our inalienable rights. ( Wildcat, 2009 , xi) Within Māori ontological and cosmological paradigms it is impossible to conceive of the present and the future as separate and distinct from the past, for the past is constitutive of the present and, as such, is inherently reconstituted within the future. (Stewart-Harawira, 2005, 42) In fact, incorporating time travel, alternate realities, parallel universes and multiverses, and alternative histories is a hallmark of Native storytelling tradition, while viewing time as pasts, presents, and futures that flow together like currents in a navigable stream is central to Native epistemologies. ( Dillon, 2016a , 345)

A “Queer-Looking Compound”: Race, Abjection, and the Politics of Hawaiian Poi

The ecological, cosmological, and genealogic meanings of kalo (taro) and the foods made from it bind the practice of eating poi, an important traditional staple food, to both material and cultural concepts of Hawaiian identity. During the nineteenth century, the taste of foods like poi became a subject of debate among newcomers to the archipelago, who used the language of disgust, queerness, and civility to distinguish Euro-American whiteness from indigeneity through foodways. While discourses about the palatability of poi were, and still are, typically couched in the language of personal preference, an examination of historical sources reveal settler abjection to instead be a culturally conditioned approach to Native taste and foodways. This article uses the subject of kalo to extend histories of colonial tastemaking into the ongoing dimensions of settler terrain through discourse analysis of nineteenth century travelogues, popular media, and Native epistemology in order to reveal the interlocking logics of taste and territory.

Epistemological Dominance and Social Inequality

Can epistemologies anchor processes of social inequality? In this paper, we consider how epistemological dominance in science, engineering, and health (SE&H) fields perpetuates disadvantages for students who enter higher education with alternative epistemologies. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Native American students enrolled at two US research universities who adhere to or revere indigenous epistemologies, we find that epistemological dominance in SE&H degree programs disadvantages students through three processes. First, it delegitimizes Native epistemologies and marginalizes and silences students who value them. Second, in the process of imparting these dominant scientific epistemologies, SE&H courses sometimes require students to participate in pedagogical practices that challenge indigenous ways of knowing. Third, students encounter epistemological imperialism: most students in the sample are working to earn SE&H degrees in order to return to tribal communities to “give back,” yet, because the US laws regulating the practice of SE&H extend onto tribal lands, students must earn credentials in epistemologies that devalue, delegitimate, and threaten indigenous knowledge ways to practice on tribal lands. We examine how students navigate these experiences, discuss the implications of these findings for SE&H education, and describe how epistemological dominance may serve as a mechanism of inequality reproduction more broadly.

Material Nature, Visual Sovereignty, and Water Rights: Unpacking the Standing Rock Movement

Material Nature, Visual Sovereignty, and Water Rights:Unpacking the Standing Rock Movement Anna M. Brígido-Corachán (bio) Introduction The 11-foot-tall mile-marker made by activists at the Oceti Sakowin Camp in 2016 is one of the most emblematic visual icons of the Standing Rock movement. Hand-carved from wood and pointing to Native American reservations, nature sites, cities, and foreign countries, among others, the mile-marker post bears witness to the multilayered preoccupations and collective strategies of the protestors against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). The post highlights the value of overlapping places, Native territories, epistemologies, and concerns, while intertribal coalition building, solidarity, and the urgent vindication of sovereignty through visual resignification gain center stage.1 In line with this land-based, Indigenous-centered, and multivocal mile-marker, in this essay I explore Native American environmentalism through a historical and visual analysis of the 2016–2017 Standing Rock/#NoDAPL movement. I give a brief overview of the history of the movement and then focus on a specific set of the group's decolonizing strategies, which are articulated around three core issues: 1. A reassertion of Traditional Environmental Knowledge (TEK), human rights, and place-based solidarity—all of which are central to ongoing Native American struggles for self-government (Coulthard, "Land"); 2. A critical revision of historical imaginaries and decolonizing practices; and 3. The struggle for visual sovereignty (Raheja, "Reading" 1163). These practices aim to subvert shifting media portrayals of Native Americans that continue to feed from symbolic spatial settings and (neo)colonialist stereotypes. Significantly, the set of photographs examined in this essay (which are taken from social media sites managed by the #NoDAPL movement: Indigenous Rising and Indigenous Rising Media) rarely attempt to capture or represent water, even though this other-than-human person, a sacred but also material/physical being in Native American epistemologies, is key to understanding the plight of Standing Rock and of other Indigenous communities [End Page 69] today (see Hallowel). Instead, the movement's visual displays in social media seem bound to the land itself and lay an emphasis on the domestic, revitalizing activities of the Native community through intimate and reciprocal interactions with the land. To understand the complex processes and nationwide media-shifts that have been triggered by Standing Rock activism, it is important to stress that, while #NoDAPL managed to garner unprecedented US and even international media attention during 2016 and 2017, most Americans are still ignorant of the fact that Native communities have been actively protesting toxic waste storage, open-pit uranium mine exploitation, contamination of soil, water, animal, and human life, hydroelectric dam flooding, and forced relocation for several decades. During this time, the Native American environmentalist movement has progressively disassociated itself from the New Age ecological Indian/mystical shaman stereotype.2 Moving away from colonialist tropes such as the mythologized wilderness, virgin landscapes, noble savages, and spiritual quests, First Nations today are instead concerned with material nature, that is, with the sheer materiality of soil, rock, and water as it relates to the governance of natural resources, which is too often tinted by environmental racism and its poisonous effects on Native bodies (see Adamson; Adamson, Evans, and Stein; Fitzgerald). Rooted in Indigenous histories and epistemologies, First Nations activists understand and engage these natural entities as spiritual and material beings, not merely as resources. Beyond the sacred status and polyvocal function they share in traditional Native epistemologies and praxes, water and land are embedded in and shaped by material processes and sociopolitical realities. As Native historian Donald Fixico has pointed out, "American capitalism, deriving from a tradition of Eurocentrism, has continued through the twentieth century to exploit tribal nations for their natural resources, thus forcing Indian leadership to adopt modern corporate strategies to ensure the survival of their nations and people" (x). And, indeed, although many Native tribes embrace capitalist practices such as casino management, uncontrolled forest exploitation, mining, and others, Native environmentalist groups consciously grapple with these contradictions in their pursuit of a more respectful and balanced relationship with our natural surroundings. In the twenty-first century, they have also introduced new visual formats and digital channels to present these complex...

Why Aren't Political Scientists Interested in Native American Politics?

Native Americans have been structurally excluded from the discipline of political science in the continental United States, as has Native epistemology and political issues. I analyze the reasons for these erasures and elisions, noting the combined effects of rejecting Native scholars, political issues, analysis, and texts. I describe how these arise from presumptions inherent to the disciplinary practices of U.S. political science, and suggest a set of alternative formulations that could expand our understanding of politics, including attention to other forms of law, constitutions, relationships to the environment, sovereignty, collective decision-making, U.S. history, and majoritarianism.

Sovereignty and Survivance—The Pathways of Native Politics

Native Americans have been structurally excluded from the discipline of political science in the continental United States, as has Native epistemology and political issues. I analyze the reasons for these erasures and elisions, noting the combined effects of rejecting Native scholars, political issues, analysis, and texts. I describe how these arise from presumptions inherent to the disciplinary practices of U.S. political science, and suggest a set of alternative formulations that could expand our understanding of politics, including attention to other forms of law, constitutions, relationships to the environment, sovereignty, collective decision-making, U.S. history, and majoritarianism.

Absence Does Not Make the Indigenous Political Heart Grow Fonder

Native Americans have been structurally excluded from the discipline of political science in the continental United States, as has Native epistemology and political issues. I analyze the reasons for these erasures and elisions, noting the combined effects of rejecting Native scholars, political issues, analysis, and texts. I describe how these arise from presumptions inherent to the disciplinary practices of U.S. political science, and suggest a set of alternative formulations that could expand our understanding of politics, including attention to other forms of law, constitutions, relationships to the environment, sovereignty, collective decision-making, U.S. history, and majoritarianism.

Why Does Political Science Hate American Indians?

Native Americans have been structurally excluded from the discipline of political science in the continental United States, as has Native epistemology and political issues. I analyze the reasons for these erasures and elisions, noting the combined effects of rejecting Native scholars, political issues, analysis, and texts. I describe how these arise from presumptions inherent to the disciplinary practices of U.S. political science, and suggest a set of alternative formulations that could expand our understanding of politics, including attention to other forms of law, constitutions, relationships to the environment, sovereignty, collective decision-making, U.S. history, and majoritarianism.

Marginalizing Politics: The Conceptual and Epistemological Barriers to American Indians

Native Americans have been structurally excluded from the discipline of political science in the continental United States, as has Native epistemology and political issues. I analyze the reasons for these erasures and elisions, noting the combined effects of rejecting Native scholars, political issues, analysis, and texts. I describe how these arise from presumptions inherent to the disciplinary practices of U.S. political science, and suggest a set of alternative formulations that could expand our understanding of politics, including attention to other forms of law, constitutions, relationships to the environment, sovereignty, collective decision-making, U.S. history, and majoritarianism.

Actualizing Political Science

Native Americans have been structurally excluded from the discipline of political science in the continental United States, as has Native epistemology and political issues. I analyze the reasons for these erasures and elisions, noting the combined effects of rejecting Native scholars, political issues, analysis, and texts. I describe how these arise from presumptions inherent to the disciplinary practices of U.S. political science, and suggest a set of alternative formulations that could expand our understanding of politics, including attention to other forms of law, constitutions, relationships to the environment, sovereignty, collective decision-making, U.S. history, and majoritarianism.