Indigenizing Philosophy through the Land: A Trickster Methodology for Decolonizing Environmental Ethics and Indigenous Futures

Brian Burkhart

Book: Indigenizing Philosophy through the Land: A Trickster Methodology for Decolonizing Environmental Ethics and Indigenous Futures (Michigan State University Press, 2019)
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Author: Brian Burkhart
Citizen, Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma; Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Oklahoma

Chair: Lorraine Mayer
Citizen, Metis Nation of Manitoba; Professor, Department of Native Studies, Brandon University

Critics:

• Gordon Christie
  Inupiat/Inuvialuit; Professor, Peter A. Allard School of Law, Director of the Indigenous Legal Studies Program, University of British Columbia
• Thurman Lee Hester
  Citizen, Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma
• Dennis McPherson
  Ojibwa, Band Member of Couchiching First Nation; Associate Professor, Indigenous Learning, Lakehead University

About the book: Land is key to the operations of coloniality, but the power of the land is also the key anticolonial force that grounds Indigenous liberation. This work is an attempt to articulate the nature of land as a material, conceptual, and ontological foundation for Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and valuing. As a foundation of valuing, land forms the framework for a conceptualization of Indigenous environmental ethics as an anticolonial force for sovereign Indigenous futures. This text is an important contribution in the efforts to Indigenize Western philosophy, particularly in the context of settler colonialism in the United States. It breaks significant ground in articulating Indigenous ways of knowing and valuing to Western philosophy—not as artifact that Western philosophy can incorporate into its canon, but rather as a force of anticolonial Indigenous liberation. Ultimately, Indigenizing Philosophy through the Land shines light on a possible road for epistemically, ontologically, and morally sovereign Indigenous futures.