Leasau-Beez Aff

We begin our investigation into this year’s topic with a story,
Chapter One: Wind Power—

Wind is a matter of interpretation, as the Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Silko, in her groundbreaking work Ceremony, wrote:

[Eric Cheyfitz, Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters, Cornell University. “Balancing the Earth: Native American Philosophies and the Environmental Crisis.” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, Volume 65, Number 3, Autumn 2009, pp. 139-162. Project Muse.]

These interpretations become a struggle between fundamental worldviews, one that continues today. Greg Cajete, in Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence, said:

[Eric Cheyfitz, Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters, Cornell University. “Balancing the Earth: Native American Philosophies and the Environmental Crisis.” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, Volume 65, Number 3, Autumn 2009, pp. 139-162. Project Muse.]

However control is an illusion that ignores wind power, as the Maricopa story “Cloud and Wind” reminds us…

[The Bearskin Quiver, 2002]

Therefore, we affirm the resolution through the lens of an indigenous epistemology in the area of wind.

Chapter Two: The Rage for Order—

The European invasion of North America in 1492 founded the West on a fundamental contradiction, the Rage for Order. It is an imperial epistemology obsessed with rational order and an anxious fear of chaos. This individualistic alienation is based on a separation of culture from nature that makes capitalism possible. This commodification of the environment crowds out indigenous epistemologies, and is the root cause of our separation from nature that allows environmental destruction.

Cheyfitz ‘09
[Eric Cheyfitz, Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters, Cornell University. “Balancing the Earth: Native American Philosophies and the Environmental Crisis.” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, Volume 65, Number 3, Autumn 2009, pp. 139-162. Project Muse.]

The continued crowding out of indigenous epistemologies and its politics of environmental destruction will guarantee our collective extinction—

Tinker ‘96
[George E. Tinker, Iliff School of Technology, 1996. Defending Mother Earth: Native American Perspectives on Environmental Justice, ed. Jace Weaver, p. ]

Chapter Three: Native Science—

Our affirmation of indigenous epistemologies provides a corrective to the Western scientific culture/nature divide that commodifies the environment and allow its destruction. Our epistemic break creates space for Native Science, a notion of natural democracy and kinship that resolves the West’s oppositional alienation.

Cheyfitz ‘09
[Eric Cheyfitz, Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters, Cornell University. “Balancing the Earth: Native American Philosophies and the Environmental Crisis.” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, Volume 65, Number 3, Autumn 2009, pp. 139-162. Project Muse.]

Our affirmation of indigenous epistemologies reclaims ceremony as a springboard for natural democracy. It opposes the capitalist power to profane all that’s sacred— Native science inserts issues of social justice into discussions of technology and the imperial eradication of human and ecological communities.

Cheyfitz ‘09
[Eric Cheyfitz, Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters, Cornell University. “Balancing the Earth: Native American Philosophies and the Environmental Crisis.” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, Volume 65, Number 3, Autumn 2009, pp. 139-162. Project Muse.]

Our affirmation of indigenous epistemologies is an act of decolonialization with radical potential. Our method counters the imperial dominance of Western epistemologies and spurs new forms of knowledge production.

Atalay ‘06
[Sonya Atalay, Assistant Professor Anthropology, Indiana University Bloomington. “Indigenous Archaeology as Decolonizing Practice.” American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 30, No. 3/4, Special Issue: Decolonizing Archaeology (Summer - Autumn, 2006), pp. 280-310. JSTOR.]