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1. sold the ranch for $3 million to a group of southern California investors, ranch
administrators, yielding to aggressive business interests, pressured Native fami-
lies one by one to relocate to Bakersfield until all the homesteads on Tejon Creek
were finally razed. Today, descendants of the Tejon Indians still live in the greater
Bakersfield area, where some have formed the Tinoqui Chalola Council, an ac-
tivist organization dedicated to regaining legal recognition by the Bureau of In-
dian Affairs and protecting burial grounds and other sacred sites. Since the title
of Phillips’s book includes the word “beyond,” it might have been advisable for
him to acknowledge the vibrant continuity of this Native community in the
present. The absence of such acknowledgment always runs the danger of imply-
ing a highly resented relegation to the past or the museum.
Anne Waters, ed. American Indian Thought: Philosophical Essays. Malden ma:
Blackwell Publishing, 2004. xxxviii ⫹ 305 pp. Paper, $29.95.
Elizabeth Archuleta
In an effort to raise greater awareness about American Indian worldviews in the
field of philosophy,American Indian Thought is the first book to gather the work
of American Indians with PhDs in philosophy as well as American Indian schol-
ars whose interdisciplinary philosophical work has contributed to American In-
dian studies. Ultimately, this edited volume asks what American Indian philos-
ophy looks like when viewed through philosophical training and American
Indian experience. Included in the collection are essays that challenge the belief
that philosophy constructs views stemming from presumably neutral questions
into the human condition. The seventeen scholars who have contributed to this
collection also challenge the belief that philosophy can transcend boundaries
of race, culture, class, gender, or sexuality in order to uncover or disclose uni-
versal truths. What we get, then, are essays that problematize philosophy’s self-
perception, because this traditional, Western outlook omits other philosophies
or questions not arising out of Western traditions.
The book is divided into eight parts that outline the various branches of phi-
losophy. Part 1 (“American Indians and Philosophy”) contains an essay by Vine
Deloria Jr. which takes a more general look at the field and lays the foundation
for everything that follows. He asks, “What . . . are the necessary requirements
or ideological context in which an American Indian philosophy can be created?”
He names the challenges and lists the requirements needed for crafting the de-
velopment of an American Indian philosophy. Deloria makes clear that cause-
and-effect is a crude way of explaining the world and expanding Western knowl-
edge systems when compared to tribal peoples’ methods for answering similar
questions. It is through comparison that Deloria would have us develop an
344 Book Reviews

2. American Indian philosophy—identifying the different approaches that tribal
societies and Westerners take to the world all the while recognizing that their
conclusions are equal.
The remainder of the sections include “Epistemology and Knowing,” “Sci-
ence, Math, Logic,” “Metaphysics and Being,” “Phenomenology and Ontology,”
“Ethics and Respect,” “Social and Political Philosophy,” and “Esthetics.” Com-
paring Western and American Indian approaches to creating meaning, the col-
lection begins with essays by Brian Yazzie Burkhart, V. F. Cordova, and John Du-
Four that discuss how we come to know, explain, and understand the world. The
authors contend that Western philosophy approaches the creation of knowledge
as if there are universal truths to be discovered. In contrast, American Indian
philosophy concerns itself with the path one takes to achieve knowledge, where
no path is wrong as long as one maintains connections with and understands the
intricate interdependencies with the surrounding world. In another of her many
essays that appear in this collection, Cordova also defines the American Indian
artist as seeker of knowledge and a seer of worlds that would remain unknown to
others without art. Yet, Cordova maintains that it is the artist’s responsibility to
create beauty, for when art is released into the world the image created can have
positive or negative consequences. David Martínez explores these principles of
esthetics and ethics in his examination of Ojibwa artist George Morrison.
A theme that runs through most of the essays is the realization that the envi-
ronment and all who inhabit it are interconnected and dependent on one an-
other, an idea expressed in Indigenous languages, values, measures of excellence,
and more. For example, when V. F. Cordova shares in her first essay the Anish-
nawbe word, engwaamizin, she explains that it contains a whole worldview con-
nected with time and place which extends its meaning beyond the literal trans-
lation, “tread carefully.” Similarly, while focusing on science and math, Gregory
Cajete and Thomas N. Norton-Smith emphasize that place and one’s relation-
ship to the environment is embedded in language, and within language we will
find encoded a people’s connection to and relationship with a region where they
have learned to survive and adapt and where their cultures and languages have
emerged and evolved. Therefore, to make the sciences and logical thinking that
it requires meaningful to American Indian students, Anne Waters demonstrates
how the incorporation of American Indian philosophy and Indigenous cultural
contexts will prevent Indian students from feeling excluded. In two separate es-
says, Thurman Lee Hester Jr. also offers examples of how American Indian phi-
losophy can become a tool for empowering American Indian students.
V. F. Cordova continues to explore the interconnections and interdependen-
cies inherent in American Indian philosophies when she compares Westerners’
and American Indians’ divergent ethical codes of conduct, which she bases on
the notions of “I” and “We.” She defines “I” as the autonomous individual who
american indian quarterly/winter & spring 2005/vol. 29, nos. 1 & 2 345

3. can potentially be in conflict with every other individual, creating a situation that
necessitates the externalization of moral and legal rules designed to deter certain
behaviors through the threat of punishment. In contrast, Native Americans in-
ternalize rules for proper conduct, because their communities recognize that
they live in a state of the “We,” a worldview that recognizes what is known as the
“butterfly effect.” Asking questions similar to Cordova’s, Marilyn Notah Verney
critiques traditional academic philosophy for its tendency to make distinctions
that separate individuals or their ideas. Verney feels that this methodology results
in a loss of meaning because it severs connections between all things.
Clearly, American Indians’ exposure to Western thought and practices has led
to changes that require the kind of creative rethinking that Waters encourages.
The adaptation process engaged by American Indians, brought on by assimila-
tion efforts, also includes the transformation of traditional settlement patterns
that originally fit with their respective geographical regions. According to Ted
Jojola, community identity was formed and can be traced in settlement patterns,
which he claims Western land-use principles have disrupted. While Jojola im-
plies that these interruptions threaten the continuation of identity connected
with space, time, and place, other essays express the importance of creativity that
emerges out of the chaos of colonialism, a chaos that also contributes to the cre-
ation of meaning. American Indian philosophers recognize that universal truths
are never achieved because the world or the environment in which we live is con-
stantly changing or in a state of chaos.
Maureen E. Smith, Leslie Nawagesic, Laurie Anne Whitt, and Annette
Arkeketa also examine how the ongoing presence of colonialism, supported by
governmental legislation and policies, has affected American Indians’ religious
freedom and sense of self as well as the production and commodification of sci-
entific knowledge gained from Indigenous traditional knowledge. Tracing simi-
lar legislative histories, Steve Russell insists that American jurisprudence is fer-
tile ground for American Indian philosophical inquiry, because the law has
failed American Indians. Rather than turning to postmodern critiques of the law
that merely expose its existing hypocrisies, Russell calls for something else that
can bridge the gap between human rights theory embodied in law and human
rights praxis that has been denied American Indians through the law. Dale
Turner appears to provide an answer when he calls on American Indian intel-
lectuals to become what he calls “word warriors,” individuals who take on the re-
sponsibility of legal and political discourses in order to defend the integrity of
tribal governments and communities.
Until this publication, American Indian philosophy appeared to be a recov-
ery project as evidenced by the thirty-one-page bibliography appended at the
conclusion of the essays. The bibliography brings together, probably for the first
time, the books, chapters, articles, Web pages, and online journals that will en-
346 Book Reviews

4. able others to read about and engage in American Indian philosophical dis-
course as well as teach Indigenous worldviews in the classroom. The inclusion of
a bibliography provides a valuable resource to anyone interested in American
Indian philosophy or topics relevant to American Indian studies.
Together, the authors included in this collection bring readers into a mean-
ingful dialogue with Western and Indigenous philosophies about science, femi-
nism, math, language, education, art, and more. Anne Waters’s edited collection
makes a critical and indispensable contribution to broadening the field of phi-
losophy. Insofar as American Indian worldviews as a philosophical concept are
to be analyzed and critiqued, this collection makes an interesting move by view-
ing and unveiling the ideologies of Western philosophy and Western privilege
via American Indian philosophical perspectives, which makes this work a valu-
able addition to anyone’s collection.
american indian quarterly/winter & spring 2005/vol. 29, nos. 1 & 2 347