First Symposium on Indigenous Philosophy across the Americas: Epistemologies and Ontologies outside the Settler Colonial Hegemony

James Maffie is Senior Lecturer, Emeritus, Department of History, University of Maryland.

Title: A Mexica Metaphysics of Transformative Becoming

Abstract: The Mexica cosmos exhibits three patterns of transformative becoming and change: olin, malinalli, and nepantla. After defining these, I focus upon one kind of malinalli-defined transformation: what I call comestible transformation or the transformation that occurs in one person when they consume life-energies of another person. After briefly discussing the nature of maize, I examine the transformation that occurs in human beings consequent upon their consuming maize. 

Getty L. Lustila is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Philosophy and Religion and Associate Director of the Humanities Center.

Title: TBA

Natalie Avalos is an Assistant Professor in the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of Colorado, Boulder. 

Title: Restoring the Sacred: The Ethical Ground of Land as Kin

Abstract: Settler colonialism has produced a de-sacralized world; one devoid of any coherent morality, where only material life and its consumption matters. Western materialism and its attendant derision of the immaterial, not just in spiritual power but in all forms of respect for the numinous, has made Native peoples vulnerable to existential estrangement from the land and one another. Native peoples in the Americas generally understand the universe as alive and sentient—all phenomena in it are understood to be a distinct expression of life force, or spirit. Human and other-than-human persons, such as plants, animals, rivers, winds and mountains, are material expressions of spirit. In this sense, material life is not inert, it is teeming with life, conscious awareness and thus, intersubjective. This is why decolonization has been described as a shift in worldview, or rather a return to an Indigenous one (Deloria 1994). In this sense, liberation is both material and metaphysical, necessitates a transformed experience and comprehension of oneself in relation to a greater reality. In this talk, I draw on ethnographic research with Native and Chicano peoples as well as Indigenous and decolonial theory to illustrate how the regeneration of relations to land as kin restores an embodied sense of the sacred, which can be understood as an Indigenous ontology. It is through these reciprocal relations that land-based ethics become apparent, not as ideas in the abstract, but as living commitments to care for the inhabitants of land as extensions of oneself.

Zenón Depaz Toledo is Professor and Chair in the Department of Philosophy at Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Peru.

Title: The Waka’s Merciful Silence

Abstract: Based on a passage from the ancient Quechua Huarochirí Manuscript in which an Andean deity confronts the questioning of a convert to Christianity, I will propose some reflections on ancestral Andean sacredness—its connections to the diversity, relationality, and contingency that characterize life—as well as its continued relevance and projection in a late modern era burdened by nihilism and fundamentalisms (intertwined phenomena) of a monotheistic matrix.