History in place: A response to Thomas Alexander and Woody Holton

Abstract

I am grateful to Alexander and Holton for their insightful engagement with Native Pragmatism. They have raised key issues about the book, but more importantly, they have taken up what I see as the central issue of the work: rethinking the history of American thought against a background of pluralism. For most of its professional career, philosophy in America has uncritically viewed itself as a product of European thought relocated to a “new world.” While the European tradition was indeed brought to the Western hemisphere, it is also not the case that it arrived in an empty world or a world populated by people from whom nothing could be learned. The European tradition arrived in a long-occupied place, populated by people who had survived and in most cases flourished in a context of cultural diversity and who already had well-established ways of thinking and interacting with each other and their environments. The immigration of Europeans marked new interactions framed on one side by what Europeans brought from Europe and on the other by indigenous strategies for interacting with strangers. Native Pragmatism sets out to problematize the received histories of American philosophy by examining a range of the interactions between immigrant Europeans and Native North Americans and to suggest a particular line of development. Alexander and Holton, even as they critique the work, nevertheless engage in the broader questions of how we understand American philosophy and make a significant contribution to expanding the inquiry that Native Pragmatism begins. The two commentaries raise a large number of issues that deserve attention. Given space constraints I will try to focus on the most interesting and, for Native Pragmatism, the most problematic: how to understand the interaction between Native and European America. Taken together, the two commentaries and Native Pragmatism present three strategies for carrying out this work. Holton’s is an historical approach, developed in his book, Forced Founders, that is grounded in a broad range of evidence that serves to undermine the received view of American history, especially the history of the American Revolution. Alexander, on the other hand, is skeptical about histories as a means of understanding Native American thought and suggests that we consider a comparative approach that seeks to find a common philosophical ground across apparent cultural differences. Such an approach has the advantage of widening the range of American