 I am tempted to say something like, Scott Pratt, philosopher is more popular than female orgasm, and, um, I feel like there are so many competing events tonight, including the aforementioned talks, um, and so I'm just really, uh, delighted and appreciative that you're all here. I'm Lisa Healthier. I'm in the philosophy department here at Gustavus. I'm the person who's formerly known as the world's formerly junior colleague. Uh, anyway, uh, enough about you. What do you think of that? Uh, I'd like to want to introduce our guest tonight. Um, I first met Scott Pratt, I think when he was working on a dissertation on John Dewey up at the University of Minnesota, it was lonely because there weren't really very many John Dewey people up there, and so he said, you know, could we like just get together and talk about Dewey? And I of course said, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. So we struck up a friendship over, but I was supposed to be a philosopher. And at the time, Scott was, I think, simultaneously writing a dissertation, being the primary parent of a new instant, and working at Helen University in the admission office, and I still don't, it explains why he's since written 73 books, because I wish I could go to time management. We should ask, actually ask him about that. He, prior to going to University of Minnesota, he did his undergraduate degree at the Lloyd College in Wisconsin. Um, after his dissertation, he got a job at the University of Oregon where he has been actually ever since, 19 years, he just said. Um, and he served there at all kinds of capacities, director of grad studies, the chair of the department, and he also actually, for a little while left for an administrative post before returning to the classroom. Um, Scott, I really credit Scott with changing being one of the most important persons for changing my way of thinking about the history of American philosophy, which is near and dear to my heart. A number of his books have been hugely influential. I mean, one of them is called Native Pragmatism, which looks at the ways in which Native philosophy already were shaping American thought, particularly the tradition of thought, known as pragmatism. He wrote with two other, he edited with two other colleagues, an anthology of American philosophy that starts with responses to slavery. And for me, as somebody trying to think about how can we do American philosophy this book was transformative and it was the spine of my American philosophy class for a lot of years until this year. Um, he, um, I just learned tonight at dinner that he wrote a book on logic, which I didn't know anything about, right? Woo-hoo! He also, um, is in the process of finishing up a book on the history of American philosophy, which my classes is reading this semester and we're finding enormously helpful for contextualizing these sometimes canonical and sometimes that's what canonical figures in the American tradition. Um, and right now he's working out a book about post-Civil War genocides of Native American people. Um, and the work tonight sort of comes out of that. Um, but I think I could say it was really the only thing that I needed to say about Scott is he was Kara's dissertation advisor. So, without further ado. That was, thank you very much Lisa. And thank you all for coming. And Lisa, that was a great, thank you. Oh, I appreciate it. Um, so, uh, so my purpose tonight is to talk about, um, American Indian philosophy after the Dakota War. And I'm going to start by talking about the Dakota War some, and then I'm going to talk about some Native American philosophers, American Indian philosophers, who I think are influenced by a line of thinking that comes in the wake of the Dakota War. And you'll sort of see how that comes together as we go. Um, before I start though, I'd like to, I'd like to begin by acknowledging that we are on, as you all know, Dakota land. It's easy to forget the history of this place, given the distance from the events that led to the founding of towns like St. Peter and Nankato. But it is nevertheless important to remember, especially if we're to learn about the places where we live. So, Dakota people, when they greet each other, often say, something in Dakota which I'm going to pronounce now, but my accent is terrible. How Mitakuyapi. Awasen. Kante-wastea. Nabe. Siyuzapito. Hello, my relatives. With a good heart, I greet you all with a handshake. The purpose, as I said a minute ago, is to discuss the American philosophical, the American Indian philosophical tradition that emerged after the Dakota War. Between the war in 1862 and the massacre at Wounded Me Creek in 1890, American Indian resistance to settler colonialism changed. It is the resistance that emerged in the Dakota War changed its character to what I'm going to argue is actually a philosophical resistance. In response to new situations, a pan-Indian movement emerged that tried to find common ground among the diverse nations of indigenous Americans. And to make a case for the necessity of indigenous ways of life. I will try to set out the basic commitments of the resulting philosophical views that, in a sense, explain why Luther's standing there as a Native American philosopher from the mid-20th century would say that only the Indian can save America. So on August 17th, now most of you probably have already heard this story of the Dakota War. How many of you have studied it or read about it? That's great. Okay. So I'm going to go kind of quickly through the history, but there are questions afterward. We can kind of come back to it. On August 17th, 1862, the picture in the background, by the way, is a picture of Birch Cooley, which is the major battle in the Dakota War. On August 17th, four Dakota, Santee Sioux, hunters killed five white settlers in Acton Township in Meeker County. After the hunters returned to their village, it was decided after some debate that war with the settlers was necessary. That's Little Crow. He was the leader of the band that the four hunters belonged to. Within days, Dakota warriors attacked settlers and soldiers all along the Minnesota River Valley. A month and a half later, when the war ended, more than 600 settlers had been killed, about 70 of them were soldiers, along with about 100 Dakota. This is a picture, actually, it's kind of hard to see, of refugees fleeing the first days of the Dakota War. People all along the Minnesota River Valley headed south, headed out of the region of the Dakotas, because the native warriors were attacking in isolated cabins as well as towns and so forth. Let's say something about the casualties. So on September 26th, that's 1862, nearly 2,000 Dakota convinced by General Sibley that they would be well treated, surrendered at a place called Camp Release near Montevideo, Minnesota, shortly after the battle of Woodlake, where a group of Dakota warriors were defeated by troops under Sibley, and one of the Dakota war leaders, Mankato, the guy that Mankato was killed. As I said, 2,000 surrendered. Of the 2,300 were immediately arrested. 303 were immediately arrested by General Sibley and tried for rape and murder. And just over 1,600 others were removed to this location. This is the view from Fort Snelling. This was a camp below Fort Snelling, usually referred to as a prison camp, as you see it was walled, and it housed 1,600 Dakota through the winter months of 1862-63. Meanwhile, the 303 Dakota men who were arrested and tried were held at Sibley Park, and Mankato, of course, wasn't called that at the time. Those of the 1,600 that survived the winter at Fort Snelling, the remainder were shipped by Steamboat down the Mississippi and to the Missouri River, and then up the Missouri River to a place called Crow Creek in South Dakota. In fact, by 1864, nearly all the Dakota that lived in Minnesota had been removed, and most of them went to reservations in the Dakota Territory, and that's a picture of Crow Creek, a pretty desolate spot. Others remained in Minnesota but went underground. Many of them became farmers and Christians, even as they struggled to remain Dakota. The murder of the five settlers at Acton had been unplanned. The response by the Dakota to go to war, according to the often told tale, there's usually an account given as to why the war started, and the normal story says it's the result of years of mistreatment by the federal government and the traders who made their fortunes selling overpriced food and supplies to the Indians. When the Civil War began in April 1862, and don't forget the Dakota War and the Civil War happened at the same time, right? So April 1862, the U.S. entered, the federal government entered into the war against the Southern Successionist States and began to military engagement and drew a lot of troops from what was then the Northwest into the battle and also a lot of resources, and one of the consequences of the resources being drained into the war were that the treaty payments that were guaranteed by the U.S. government to be paid to the Dakota were held up, because there was only a huge amount of money, so the federal government decided not to send the money to the Dakota. The result of this was through the summer of 1862 a huge lack of food and eventually starvation for the Dakota who had been counting on access to food and supplies as a result of the payments. In August 1862 at the Upper Sioux Agency, this is a picture of one of the remaining buildings, the Dakota had had enough and they came to the agency and they threatened to occupy the storehouses and remove the food and supplies and so forth. The person who was in charge at the time, a guy named Galbraith, convinced them that this was not a good idea by pointing a cannon at the storehouse and saying, if you try to take it, we'll blow up all the supplies. He said, all right, all right, fine. We'll stand down if we get supplies and the traders there agreed. Unfortunately, the traders there were not all the traders there were. When the Dakota arrived at the Lower Sioux Agency to collect the supplies there, the trader who was in charge, a guy named Andrew Myrick, refused and apparently said, there's nothing to the effect of, let them eat grass or their own gum. Myrick later was killed and his body was discovered with his mouth stuffed full of grass in response to this declaration. The war on this account, the causes of the war, the war on this account was a response to greed and mistreatment. But that's not the whole story. A chief named Big Eagle, who was one of the leaders in the upper agency, remembered the cause differently. Speaking to the St. Paul Pioneer newspaper in 1894, Big Eagle recalled this. The whites, he said, were always trying to make the Indians give up their life and live like white men. And the Indians did not know how to do that and did not want to anyway. It seemed too sudden to make such a change. If the Indians had tried to make the whites live like them, the whites would have resisted and it was the same way with the Indians. By way of counterfactual, Big Eagle declared that the resistance was not about poor treatment or missing annuity payments or even the greed of traders like Myrick, but about defending a way of life. Resistance by force, however, provided no solution. Whatever took part in the war, Big Eagle said, I was against it. I had to be, I had been to Washington and knew the power of the whites and that they would finally conquer us. Whatever the resistance the Dakota would offer, Big Eagle said it would not be by force of arms. Even as the wars continued over the next 30 years, the resistance shifted ground as the project of making Indians live like white men also changed character. The Dakota War, everyone's familiar with this part of the story, after the Dakota War, Abraham Lincoln commuted the sentences of all the 39 of the 303 warriors that had been arrested and sentenced the remainder and had been sentenced to death by General Sibley. Interestingly, Lincoln thought that hanging 303 people would be too extreme. He said, well, we'll just hang those who were convicted of rape. So he went through, he had people go through the minutes of the trial and each trial lasted about three sentences on a piece of paper and two of them made specific mention of someone committing a rape. And so there were two people left and his advisor said, but Abe, because that's what they called him, but Abe, you can't just hang two, the settlers will not be. And so Lincoln went through and selected a total of 39 and sent the list to Sibley. And then followed with another letter letting one more person be saved. And then on December 26, the day after Christmas, 1862, in downtown Mankato, this is the picture that was published in the New York Times, in downtown Mankato a huge structure was built and in the course of 30 minutes, all 38 Dakota men were hanged by the U.S. Army. Later, this stone monument was erected. I was talking to some of my family that lives in Mankato and they remember this thing, but it vanished under suspect circumstances, though there are rumors about where it went. The monument that was this one is now replaced by a buffalo in Reconciliation Park. So next time you're in Mankato, stop down by the library and you can see the site. Among the people who were involved in the war were Shakabe, who has a town named after him, and this fellow named Medicine Bottle. The two of them escaped to Canada after the war, but were kidnapped by some Canadian citizens who wanted the bounty and brought back to St. Paul where they were imprisoned at Fort Snelling tribe and then they were hung, as the picture of their hanging says, on November 11, 1865. This marked the end of the Dakota war. It was the end of the war, but of course the resistance didn't stop. The new resistance, the one that followed the war, looked different. The new resistance, the post-war resistance, was exemplified by the work of a man named Ogesha, whose father, Wakande Ota, or many lightnings, had participated in the Dakota war and after it fled with Medicine Bottle and Shakabe, the people I just mentioned a minute ago, to Canada. Ogesha, who was left behind, was raised by his grandparents until 1873 when his father returned with a new name, Jacob Eastman, now a Christian congregation and urged his son to do likewise and learn the ways of settler culture. Ogesha, now Charles Eastman, attended Beloit College Preparatory School in Wisconsin. I also attended Beloit College. And that's my only interest in Charles Eastman. He attended Beloit College Preparatory School, no one to Knox College in Illinois, and then with a scholarship from Christian missionaries, completed his undergraduate degree in Dartmouth and got a medical doctorate at Boston University. On graduation, Eastman was hired by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to serve as a medical officer at Pine Ridge Reservation back in South Dakota. He arrived there in the early fall of 1892 months later, on December 29, 1890, the 7th U.S. Cavalry, the regiment that had been decimated by the Lakota in 1876 at the Little Bighorn, surrounded a camp of Lakota and attacked them near Wounded Creek, Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota. Nearly 350 men, women and children were killed. Two days later, Charles Eastman, the chief medical officer at Pine Ridge, led a group of civilians, Indian and white, to the site of the Wounded Knee Massacre to look for survivors. There weren't any. In his autobiography, he wrote, it took all of my nerve to keep my composure in the face of this spectacle and of the excitement and grief of my Indian companions, nearly every one of whom was crying aloud or singing his death song. It was, he said, a severe ordeal, especially, quote, for one who has so lately put all his faith in the Christian love and lofty ideals of a white man. Eastman's resistance that emerged over the next decade would stand against the commitments of settler society and for a set of commitments, what I'll call a philosophical standpoint, that sought to preserve American Indian ways of life in the face of what Siddharth Larson, a grovan Indian hand author, has called a post-apocalyptic world. Larson, who used to be at the University of Oregon, is now at Iowa State. This notion of living in a post-apocalyptic world is worth sort of writing down while keeping in mind. From Larson's perspective, if you're Native American, the world of the 20th and 21st centuries are literally after the apocalypse, after 95% of the population of the Americas is decimated by disease and war and poverty and hunger and cold and so on. And the people living in the 20th and 21st century who are Native are doing it against a backdrop of that kind of history. But his claim is more rich than that. It's not just that Native people are living in a post-apocalyptic world. He thinks that everyone is living in a post-apocalyptic world. The problem with many of us is we haven't noticed it yet. The Native American resistance that began after the Dakota war through the work of people like Eastman is in a really important way, both in that acknowledgement of a post-apocalyptic world in which Native Americans live in and an attempt to convince the rest of us that we should notice the kind of world that we are living in. That it is for us as well post-apocalyptic. Rather than offering a Dakota vision of survival, however, Eastman and many other American Indian thinkers of the 20th century adopted a pan-Indian perspective. In the face of removal, reservation like poverty and boarding schools that sought to eliminate Native language and culture, tribal traditions were joined together in a common struggle, not only to preserve their diverse worlds, but to make a case for their necessity. So say that again. They're not just making a case to preserve Indigenous people, but they want to say that Indigenous ways of life are necessary almost literally to the survival of the place. This is a central piece of this philosophical resistance. The resulting vision shared four philosophical commitments. The first commitment was to the idea that things are relational. That is, things exist only in and through relations with other things that are also relational. Such relationality gave rise to the second commitment, the importance of place. That is, the particular relations that characterize individuals and their groups. Third, placed relations were not given or static, but imbued with what is often called power. Not power as force in the ordinary sense, nor power as the product of systematic domination, but power as an individuating and correcting, connecting motive that seeks fulfillment of purposes. And then fourth, as a consequence of the resulting diversity of powers marked by different relational locations, this philosophical tradition was committed as well to ontological, epistemic, and phenomenological pluralism. So for those who aren't philosophers in the room, ontological means being. So the pluralism of being. Epistemic means knowledge, right? That is the pluralism of knowledges. There are different knowledges that don't necessarily all go together, and phenomenological pluralism refers to experience. There are different experiences. There's a pluralism of experiences. This philosophical view is committed to that, broad notion of pluralism. Taken together, these commitments lead to a conception of agency or personhood that has three implications. First, it challenges the central commitments of the dominant Western philosophy, in particular the standards of non-contradiction excluded middle-end identity, and I'll talk about that later, the foundations of Western conceptions of what it is to be a rational agent. Second, it shows the priority of indigenous conceptions of the world over the dominant perspective of settler colonialism. And third, it proposes a politics of place that recognizes the relationships between humans and between humans and the land and other beings that make up the world. So that's where we start. Now I want to spend a little time looking at some specific philosophers to cash out these philosophical commitments, and then we'll talk about sort of what are in general these implications of this sort of resistance. So in 1911, Charles Eastman published a book called The Soul of the Indian, whose title was called W.E.D. Du Bois's 1903 work of black resistance called The Souls of Black Book. Eastman's book was presented as an account of American Indian religion. It is this, but it also offers a philosophical framework used by indigenous people in their stand against empire. The central to this framework was the conviction that, as he put it, every creature possesses a soul in some degree, though not necessarily a soul conscious of itself. The tree, the waterfall, the grizzly bear, each is an embodied force, and as such an object of reverence. In a world in which every creature, every created thing has a soul, Eastman argued that people behave differently and with respect. Framing the resulting way of life as religious, Eastman explained, every act of an Indian's life is, in a very real sense, a religious act. He recognizes the spirit in all creation and believes that he draws from it spiritual power. Thanks are due to the creatures with whom one interacts, and freely giving back to those creatures makes reciprocal relations also mutually constructive. This ontological view of relational beings also provided a critical perspective on settler society. As a child, Eastman said, I understood how to give. I have forgotten that grace since I became civilized. I lived the natural life, whereas now I live the artificial life. Any pretty pebble was valuable to me then, every growing tree and object of reverence. Now I worship with the white man before a painted landscape whose value is estimated in dollars. Thus the Indian is reconstructed as the natural rocks are ground to powder and made into artificial blocks which may be built into walls of modern society. There's almost no better image of assimilation by the way than that. Grinding the natural rocks of people into powder, making bricks, and then putting them in a wall. That's assimilation. Even as he framed the conception of indigenous life in contrast to the reconstruction faced in settler society, he also made room to acknowledge western religion as a critical tool. He said, there is no such thing as Christian civilization. I believe that Christianity and modern civilization are opposed and irreconcilable. And that the spirit of Christianity and of our ancient religion is essentially the same. Eastman, as I said, was part of a pan-Indian movement that began in the late 19th century through the work of a number of American Indian intellectuals, many educated at boarding schools. The signal organization for the movement was the Society of American Indians that was founded in 1911, two years after the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Indians at the NAACP. Among the associate or non-Indian founding members of the SAI was the co-founder of the NAACP, W. E. B. Du Bois, social gospel movement leader Lyman Havett and actually a philosopher from Cornell University, Frank Filly. The SAI's program was never clearly settled, but the work of several of its leaders adopted views that followed the path set by Eastman. The first one I want to mention is Arthur Parker. Arthur Parker was a Seneca Indian who also served as the editor of the SAI Journal and both affirmed the need for American Indians to assimilate to the dominant economy and at the same time made a case for sustaining aspects of Indian culture as a means of combating the evils of industrial capitalism. In his first address to the SAI, and I should notice, right, I should know, Parker was a Seneca, right? Eastman was Dakota. The SAI was actually a union of people from different tribal background, right? Which meant that they didn't share a common language root, but they felt that they shared a common problem, right? Sadler colonialism. And what they tried to do was generate a view that could do two things. It could oppose Sadler colonialism on the one hand and it could reaffirm the diverse tribal cultures that they came from. So they weren't advocating like adopting some membership in some giant tribe called Pan-Indian. They were adopting a view that opposed a certain way of thinking, but then actually supported diversity among its members, right? The preservation of different cultural traditions. So in his first address to the SAI, Parker concluded, the true aim of educational effort should not be to make the Indian a white man, but simply a man normal to his environment. Here, standing against empire, commercial greed and assorted conventional ideas of white civilization required the opposite movement. Indians, he said, should cease to struggle against the culture that involves them. That they should become a factor of it so that they should use their revitalized influence and more advantageous position in asserting and developing the great ideals of their race for the good of all mankind. That's his picture, but there's the quote. There's the quote. Sorry to skip that. First one, this notion of being normal to his environment, that notion of fitness is really important to note. And then the idea that by adopting the economic model of the dominant culture would give Native people an opportunity to preserve their own cultural differences is really sort of a linchpin of this program from the SAI. This view of indigenous activism, he argued, in 1916, stood explicitly against aspects of the new system of genocide that developed in the late 19th century. In the beginning, there was an endeavor to adopt, excuse me, an endeavor to occupy the land forcibly and by various means to exterminate its barbaric owners. This is the Dakota War. The idea of extermination persisted for a long time, but there was enough sentiment to bring about a new course that of segregation. So what followed the Dakota War was almost literally the same thing that followed the Dakota War. That is segregation. That is Native people were pushed to reservations where they had to get permits to leave. So segregation became the new plan. For Parker, segregation was not a program designed to foster tribes, but was rather a continuation of the system of genocide that began with the process of displacement and removal. Segregation, he said, did more to exterminate the Indians than did bullets. Rigorously guarded reservations became a place of debasement. The practices carried out, Parker charge, have prevented the soul of the race to sink beneath the evils of civilization into misery, ignorance, disease, and despondency. The correct response, Parker argued, was to demand that settler society return certain stolen or destroyed aspects of indigenous life that could support the renewal of tribal cultures and the possibility of reciprocity with other cultures. These included indigenous intellectual and community life and economic independence. A second member of, this is important to note, a second member of the Society of American Indians was Laura Cornelius Kellogg. She was a non-niting Indian from Wisconsin. She was served as the secretary for the SAI, and in her first address to the society, she challenged the culture that had come to surround Native peoples by identifying as failures. The development of intense individualism and the age of unprecedented prosperity are largely responsible for the selfishness of the American people. To this overarching charge, she added several specific evils, including child labor, industrial accidents, unemployment, and non-sanitary living conditions. Against these consequences of settler society, Cornelius Kellogg maintained, quote, that the line of least resistance to the greatest possible good under our present circumstances is to citizenize the possibilities and to reorganize the opportunities of the Indian at home to organize the Indians' holdings into a system of economic advantages. As a response to the reservation system and its isolation and poverty, Cornelius Kellogg proposed the development of small-scale local economies that could sustain individual tribes and participate in the wider industrial economy. In her book, Our Democracy and the American Indian, published in 1920, Cornelius Kellogg presented her conception of local development aimed at making a new environment and a real home by adopting traditional village life, adapting traditional village life to the economic situation of the 20th century. Cornelius Kellogg, Parker, and Eastman each presented what they took to be a widely-shared American Indian perspective that reaffirmed that the world of indigenous peoples was made up of interdependent relations and beings sustained by their places. In this context, native people had the power to survive despite efforts by the surrounding settler society to assimilate or destroy them. This set of ontological commitments, rather than leading to the demand for the Indian community, demanded that indigenous people work to foster diverse places as a key to survival. Cornelius Kellogg called the demand for such places the Lolomi Program, using the Hopi word for perfect goodness via honey. Even as the SAI worked to respond to the dominant culture, they did so by developing a philosophical resistance. The first implication is that if there are... Oh, sorry. I have to go back to my other... There it is. So, outside the SAI, so the SAI was kind of an intellectual bastion. Most of the people in the SAI had gone to boarding school. Most of them had lost access to their original languages, right? But had as a common language English. And this provided actually the opportunity for this cooperation across cultural traditions. At the same time, outside of SAI, there were some other leaders, in particular, Luther Standing Bear. We heard Luther Standing Bear before. Standing Bear was a member of Oklahoma Lakota, and was among the first students taken to the Carlisle boarding school in Pennsylvania where he was trained as a tinsmith. Like he said in his autobiography, there wasn't much tinsmithing going on in reservations. When he returned to Carlisle, when he returned from Carlisle, he actually worked for a time as a teacher and a shopkeeper, because there was no tinsmithing, at the Pine Ridge Reservation. He then moved actually to another reservation, the Standing Rock Reservation. In 1905, he was elected chief of the Oklahoma, and after much controversy and conflict with the Bureau of Indian Affairs who left South Dakota in 1912 to go to Hollywood, where he became an actor. He was an actor from 1912 to 1939. Acting in the silent movies and then the talkies, usually playing what kind of role? Indian. Not always, actually. It turned out he also played ethnic, non-native people, particularly Eastern Europeans and Italians. And he was in a famous movie about a Bolshevik. Something about the Bolshevik rebel or something like that, and he was one of the ethnic Eastern Europeans. Quite an actor apparently. Later in life, he became an activist against conditions imposed on Lakota and Dakota peoples and wrote four books. In his last title, Lamb of the Spotted Eagle, published in 1933, Standing Bear diagnosed the failure of white society. He said, the white man does not understand the Indian. For the same reason, he does not understand America. The white man does not understand the Indians. But in the same way he doesn't understand America, he's too far removed from his formative processes. The roots of his tree of life have not yet grasped rock and sweat. In contrast, he says, in the Indian, the spirit of the land is still vested, and it will be until other men are able to divine and meet its rhythm. Men must be born and reborn to belong. Their bodies must be formed of the dust of their forefathers' bones. Standing Bear was clear about the future, about the future life of North America. He said this, it is now time for the destructive order to be reversed. In denying the Indian his ancestral rights and heritage, the white race is but robbing itself. But America can be revived, rejuvenated by recognizing a nature school of thought the Indian can save America. By the 1960s, the tradition of American Indian philosophy that stood against the settler society found a new voice in the work of fine DeLoria Jr. whose grandfather had been a co-founder of the SAI, whose Aunt Ella DeLoria was a Columbia train ethnographer. DeLoria, like his predecessors, offered both a critique of dominant European descended culture in North America and a vision of an alternative world framed by place and people by diverse agents, human and otherwise, understood as persons. For DeLoria, the central element of what he offers as American Indian philosophy is a particular conception of personhood, something personhood. It's one that rejects the idea that the world is reducible to passive matter or to substances like matter and mind. So this vision of the world as persons means that everything turns out to be either a person or part of a person. Instead, he offers this of you founded on what he calls a simple equation. Here's the simple equation. Power and place produce personality. And there's no matter. Power and place produce personality. Put another way, persons or agents, as I call them, are both relational and proposive. As relational, as place, persons or agents are like points in geometry formed by the intersection of lines. If you think about that, right? Two lines cross and a point's formed, right? The point is formed by the crossing of lines. You can find it that way. However, the example of a point is an insufficient analogy, since points are easily seen as passive constructions of someone else's activity, whoever drew the line. Agents, things that can act with a purpose, things that can act with a purpose are more than just relational beings. They're also modal, acting toward a possible future that is yet unfulfilled. This aspect of personhood, which he calls power, involves both a determinant past and possible futures that are indeterminate. To say of a tree that it has power is to say that its past is one of tree activity. Its future will at once be constrained by its past. The product of relations with other agents and its own responses from a starting point. Depending on its activities and those of the agents and next encounters, it could become, this is the tree now, depending upon who had next encounters, it could become lumber, for example, or shave for someone on a hot day, or an inspiration, or an advisor for someone who encounters it in need of their own sense of direction. Our tendency in the West is to attribute whatever possibility a thing like a tree has to the possibilities of the human beings, or at least the higher animals, in comers. But this is to miss the ontological point. This is to miss the point of being. Trees, as well as humans and higher animals and larger systems like rivers, waterfalls, and ecosystems are relational. They're placed. A tree's past and present are an intersection of activities where human purpose is only part of what has established the possibilities that exist for it in its next days or season. The ontology of individuals and groups is a matter of relations and power. That is, they are, to borrow a phrase from John Dewey, active doings and undergoings, such that what they are is better taken as who they are. In some, Deloria says, every entity has a personality and can experience a measure of free will and choice. Every entity free will and choice. Not our standard view. If ontology is the starting point, then the size and duration of agents are not given in advance, but are the characteristics of the place and power at hand. Individual human beings, as individual agents, live in relation to others, human and otherwise, and seek to fulfill their purposes as those around them do likewise. As Deloria observes, the planet itself is an agent that, as he says, nurtures smaller forms of life, people, plants, birds, animals, rivers, valleys, continents. From the perspective of the smaller forms of life, as members of larger ones, individuals are not independent, but rather are parts of larger agents who also seek to fulfill purposes and who persist as agents, even as their members die and as new members become parts. Tribes and peoples are themselves agential holes on this account in a context of other such agents sustained by their parts but not reducible to them. Just who then count as agents? The answer may not be known in advance. Since agency is relational, it can make itself apparent only in the process of relating to others. The result for Deloria is that in the moral universe, all activities, events, and entities are related, and consequently, it does not matter what kind of existence an entity enjoys, for the responsibility is always there of what to participate in the continuing creation of reality. So, if the world is composed of agents, as Deloria suggests, there are three further implications that are crucial for the philosophical resistance to settler society. The first challenges the central principles of what Western philosophy calls rationality. The second implication is the priority of Indigenous conceptions of agency over Western notions and the third points toward a conception of politics a place that begins with the recognition of collective agency or what also may be called sovereignty. Deloria's conception of agent ontology is a notion of ordering that leads to the recognition of boundaries, vagueness, and chance. This is where the philosophy starts getting there. Between the alternatives that mark the necessity of making a choice, there stands an agent whose character and disposition to act is continuous with both alternatives. Here's the picture. There you are, an agent faced with a choice. Go to perhaps talk or go to something else. You can't do both of these things much as you would like to. You're facing two options neither of which both of which you would like to do both of them are continuous with you there are things that you would do that you would like to do but you can't do both. It sets up an interesting relationship. Both of these options are available to you they're continuous with you and in a certain way they're contradictory because you can't carry them both out. At the moment of choice the person or agent in the relationship is itself a contradiction whose logical character is formally indeterminate. Such formally indeterminacy applies not only to agents individuals but to agents of greater complexity and size collective agents long-persisting agents and so on. When a community faces alternatives for going forward for example to ally with one community or another the community itself stands in a space between a boundary continuous with both sides or alternatives. The metaphorical space is at the same time part of one side A and part of the other side B but since as an agent faced by real possibilities the agent is also neither A nor B since the agent is A and B and not A and not B by the usual logical rules regarding conjunctions one can include that the agent is both A and not A and I actually brought a picture. Recognize this? Racing fans will flag is put out during races lets some driver know that they behave badly. So let's call the white field A and the black field B now I have a question is the line between A and B black or white? Yes. That is the correct answer right? Because it is both it appears to be both and neither as both what is between is A and B both. As neither what is between is not A and not B which naturally means that the line between is actually A and not A and all of you have had logic you already know that's a contradiction and a problem right? Contradictions lead you in a bad direction they leave you unable to go forward in a sense. Thus the agent is as to its direction the situation does not prescribe how to go forward from this right? It could be anything, it could be A or not and yet as an agent it can nevertheless go forward you all have faced this very situation and yet here you are despite the fact that you're an indeterminate contradiction at a certain point you can still show up and do things. As an agent you can nevertheless go forward making a choice carefully or acting acting on a guess Further from the perspective of an agent who is an observer when an object on the horizon is vague or unclear in what it is or what it will do it is not only vague for the observer but ontologically vague in anticipation of the settlement of its determining relations. Again, making a determination is not simply seeing what is already determined but it is an ontologically significant act. To recognize an ontology is to affirm the experience of vagueness as not simply a subjective state but is characteristic of the world boundaries with their indeterminate character and vagueness in the connection between things open the world to the emergence of something new by choice or by chance and for ongoing growth and change through the actions of agents. The ontological standing of boundaries and vagueness also leads to the recognition of the ordering principles that are at the heart of enlightenment philosophy that is the ordering principles that have come to frame the dominant western conception of rational agency and central to how one understands the relation between things that is the idea of orders. These common ordering principles are the principles of non-contradiction of excluded middle and identity and are recognized as logical or formal as well as ontological and epistemic principles. In much of western culture these serve as unspoken assumptions about what it is to be and to know. In simplest terms a quick reminder non-contradiction as a logical principle holds that a proposition cannot be both true and false as an ontological principle it holds that a thing cannot both be and not be what it is. The principle of excluded middle formally holds that a proposition must be either true or false and not something in between and ontologically it requires that a thing either be something a stone, a human, a Dakota or not. Thus rejecting the idea of something ontologically in between. The principle of identity and logic means that the term is identical with itself while ontologically identity means that a thing or a person or a category is identical with itself that is it removes the thing that it is. Agent ontology this view of Vindalorias violates all three principles in each of their versions. Since things are relational and so subject to change as relations change the principle of identity cannot always hold since the universe of agents is one in which there are indeterminate bound borders, vagueness and chance, the principle of excluded middle is rejected. There's always something between them. Since incompatible possibilities are real and manifested in the character of agents and boundaries, real or true contradictions are possible. According to the principles of agent ontology the middle is not excluded things change as a result of changing relations and contradiction only marks practical conflict and not logical impossibility. The commitments that mark the development of a positive philosophy about what to expect also point to a critical philosophy into challenging the underlying ordering principles of settler society. Settler society often recognizes the principles of indigenous thought as primitive and irrational. The perspective of American Indian philosophy recognizes and enlightens thought as legitimate but limited form of agency. The second implication of agent ontology is that an indigenous conception of agency is prior to the particular notion of rational agency in western philosophy. In other words while a native person from this philosophical perspective could recognize the agency of the dominant culture could see how they could be agents behaving in accordance with their interests and following certain rules the reverse is not true. Native people have to be seen as non-rational because they don't affirm the same principles of rationality that indigenous people do. From the perspective of an indigenous agent ontology the agency of enlightenment minds, rational individuals is one that recognizes only certain forms of action as legitimate agency and categorizes other forms of agency as inferior or even non-agential. The ordering principles of enlightenment philosophy non-contradiction excluded middle and identity should be seen as practical rules that govern not only that govern not ontology or knowledge in the abstract but serve as normative principles for action that is they mark a particular line of agency. Such agency settler agency expects orders to be sharp divisions so that one can rightly say everything must be on one side or the other of any given dividing line and the things remain ontologically unchanging. From this perspective there can only be one kind of legitimate agent the sort that adopts non-contradiction excluded middle and identity as guiding principles. Agents who do not are problematic, limited and not national. And so settler agency turns out to be only one way to be an agent albeit a narrow and sometimes dangerous one. Other kinds of agency can operate by affirming betweenness both formally and ontologically and lead to the expectation of both a less clear cut logical landscape and a more complex world of experience. Indigenous conceptions of agency that emerged historically in contact with European settlers utilized the wider notion and so are able to recognize the narrower form of settler agency as agency nonetheless. While settler agency and western ethics and epistemology saw legitimate agents in a world composed of non-agents and passive rocks, mountains, trees and animals operated by instinct the alternative notion of indigenous agency recognizes diverse agents and interests and the consequent need for respect for cooperation. So ultimately what this resistant indigenous philosophical position is trying to argue for is a different sense of agency one in opposition to the sort of standard view of agency that emerges in western philosophy. As a consequence of it, it gains a certain kind of perspective on western philosophy. So you can easily see that there's a question of coexistence as possible. You guys can be agents. You guys can be legitimate agents. Don't try to make us your kind of legitimate agent. That's a narrowing of what it is to be agent. In a sense, it's a kind of prescription for coexistence. Ultimately, because they're running out of time and won't get a chance to talk much about politics in place, I want to say just a couple of things about it. If it's the case that persons are formed through their relations, they're placed who you are depends upon who you know and so forth. These places are not themselves just collections of individuals living together in some land or some map, but rather are themselves agents. They have a kind of ongoing interest and stand in relation to other places as well. If it comes time to worry about things like clean water, for example, like questions of global warming and so forth, these are concerns not just that affect the self-interest of individual human beings, but affect the interests of tribes, of communities, of larger and larger groups and it suggests a whole different approach to the question of practical politics. Rather than starting from transcendent rules that state the way things should be, this sort of politics suggests the first thing you have to do is consult the place you live in. Help the place that you're in become the agent it can be in effect so that that place and other places can interact. You can look at the politics around the oil sands pipelines, for example, and read what indigenous people are saying about that process. They're not making declarations about universal principles of morality. They're making claims about the way that the pipeline affects the various places it passes through. There's a complete sort of readjustment of what constitutes politics from an indigenous point of view. This is formed not just by the fact that we've learned about the pipeline but because there's a kind of starting point that's different. There's a different kind of orientation toward what constitutes an agent, what constitutes being and knowledge and politics. So in the end, this Pan-Indian resistance that we've been talking about is something that continues to be vibrant today. If you read about Isle of the More, how many have you read about Isle of the More? Google it when you get home. Isle of the More is a movement that continues people in Canada and the United States who are working together to oppose the Tar-Sans pipeline. The project is helpfully called Sandpiper, by the way. Is your Sandpiper pretty bird? Is it worth writing? Tar-Sans pipeline. What they're trying to do is take harness this kind of politics to be a response to that policy, that international policy of how to handle oil movement and oil drilling. So in the end, what began in the Dakota war and produced Charles Eastman in a response to the fact that a forcible response to the western culture was not going to be successful turns into a philosophical perspective that is now a kind of viable philosophical outlook for responding to temporary problems not just for indigenous people. So we can in a sense, serve ourselves by thinking back to this tradition seeing how this tradition devolved its way of thinking without agency and then think about whether or not what Standing Bear said was true. Is it the case that the Indian can save America? And if so, how? What do we need to learn to make that so? So thank you all for your time.