Indigenizing Philosophy on Stolen Lands: A Worry about Settler Philosophical Guardianship

Many Canadian universities have taken heed of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s recommendations to ‘Indigenize’ their curricula. The worry remains, however, that the language of reconciliation is empty rhetoric that “metaphorizes” decolonization, rather than responds to the demands of Indigenous communities for self-determination and land back. This paper aims to consider what the activity of ‘Indigenizing’ academic philosophy (and ethics more specifically) might involve. In particular, it raises the worry that the integration of Indigenous philosophy into ethics curriculum might assimilate an understanding of “grounded normativity” into settler understandings of groundless or placeless normativity. Such an assimilation would be an operation of what Cherokee philosopher Brian Yazzie Burkhart calls “settler philosophical guardianship.” For this reason, this paper contends that the work of meaningfully ‘Indigenizing’ philosophical curricula must first critically investigate an account of placeless normativity as a function of the settler colonial drive for expansion and elimination.