Chapter 34 Exercises: Indigenous Philosophy — Land, Relationship, and Relational Ontology

Exercise 1: Thought Experiment — The Seventh Generation

You are a member of a city council in a mid-sized city. A private development company is proposing to build a large industrial complex on the outskirts of town. The project would bring 800 permanent jobs and significant tax revenue. It would also require draining a wetland that has served as a natural flood buffer and wildlife habitat for centuries, and the manufacturing process would release chemical byproducts that models suggest may gradually contaminate a regional aquifer over the next eighty to a hundred years.

Standard city council deliberation focuses on the next four-year electoral cycle, current constituent preferences, and the immediate economic needs of the community. Apply the Haudenosaunee seventh-generation principle to this decision.

Questions to work through:

1. The seventh-generation principle holds that major decisions must be evaluated by their consequences approximately 140 years into the future. Who are the "people" you are making this decision for? How does your list of stakeholders change when you extend the time horizon to 140 years?

2. The people who will bear the consequences of a contaminated aquifer 100 years from now cannot vote, cannot lobby, cannot protest, and are not yet born. Does this mean they have no claims on your decision? Why or why not? What philosophical argument would a Haudenosaunee political philosopher make about the standing of future persons?

3. The seventh-generation principle is embedded in the Great Law of Peace as a constitutional requirement — leaders are legally and philosophically bound to consider it. Compare this to current environmental regulations in the United States or your own country. What does the comparison reveal about different societies' philosophical commitments to intergenerational obligation?

4. Contemporary political philosophy has struggled with the "non-identity problem" (Derek Parfit): the people who would suffer from the contaminated aquifer 100 years from now don't exist yet, and the decisions made today will affect which specific people come to exist. So in one sense, those future people can't be harmed, because without this development they wouldn't exist. How does the seventh-generation principle respond to this philosophical puzzle? Does it need to solve the non-identity problem, or does it operate on different philosophical grounds?

5. Now make the decision. Given the seventh-generation framework, what would you recommend? How did applying this framework change your analysis compared to standard cost-benefit analysis focused on current constituents?

Exercise 2: Thought Experiment — The River's Rights

In 2017, the New Zealand Parliament granted the Whanganui River (Te Awa Tupua) legal personhood. The river can now sue and be sued; it has two legal guardians; its interests must be taken into account in any decision that affects it. The philosophical basis for this law came from Māori philosophy: Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au — "I am the river, the river is me."

Part A: The Philosophical Arguments

Apply the philosophical frameworks from multiple traditions in this chapter to construct the strongest possible case for granting legal standing to a river:

1. From Māori whakapapa: In what sense is the Whanganui River a subject, not an object? What does the genealogical relationship between the river and the people of the Whanganui mean for how the river should be treated legally and philosophically?

2. From Lakota relational ontology: On the view that reality is constituted by relationships rather than by independent substances, what is the philosophical status of a river? Is "the river" a substance (a collection of water molecules and a bed) or a node in a web of relationships? How does your answer affect what the river deserves?

3. From Robin Wall Kimmerer's grammar of animacy: If we used the animate pronoun "ki" for the river rather than "it," how would this change our philosophical obligations toward it? Is this merely a linguistic reform, or does language shape what we are capable of caring about?

Part B: The Counter-Arguments

Now construct the strongest philosophical case against granting legal personhood to rivers:

1. Legal personhood was developed to protect entities (corporations, governments) that can hold interests, make claims, and bear responsibilities. Can a river have interests in the relevant philosophical sense? What distinguishes the river's "interests" from the interests of the humans who depend on it?

2. Some critics argue that granting legal personhood to rivers anthropomorphizes nature in ways that are philosophically confused — projecting human-style agency onto non-agents. How would a philosopher in the tradition of this chapter respond to this objection?

Part C: Your Assessment

Having worked through both sides, what is your philosophical assessment? Does relational ontology provide adequate philosophical grounds for extending legal standing to rivers and ecosystems? What would Western legal philosophy need to change to accommodate this? And what might be lost — as well as gained — if it did?

Exercise 3: Journaling — Place and Relationship

Set aside at least thirty minutes for this exercise. Find a quiet place, and write without stopping.

Prompt:

Think of a specific place — a place where you grew up, a place that has been deeply formative in your life, a place you return to in memory or in practice. It might be a childhood backyard, a particular stretch of water, a city neighborhood, a grandparent's farm, a school playground, a mountain you have climbed more than once.

Write about your relationship to this place. As you write, try consciously to use the frameworks of this chapter:

• Instead of describing the place as a setting or background, describe it as a relationship — what does the place give to you? What does it ask of you?
• Can you trace something like a whakapapa of this place — how it came to be what it is, what forces and beings shaped it, what your own genealogical or personal connection to it is?
• Can you identify ways in which the place has been a teacher — what have you learned from this specific place that you could not have learned from a textbook?
• What would it mean to describe your relationship to this place in terms of obligation — not just what the place gives you, but what you owe it? What would practicing ayni (reciprocity) look like in your relationship with this place?
• What is threatened about this place — by development, by climate change, by your own absence from it? What would be lost if it were destroyed or radically altered?

After writing, reflect: Did describing this relationship in relational rather than property terms change how you understood it? Did you encounter resistance — moments where the framework felt strange or forced? What does that resistance reveal about your own default ontological assumptions?

Exercise 4: Framework Comparison — Three Accounts of the Relational Self

This chapter argues that, in multiple Indigenous philosophical traditions, the self is not a substance — an independent individual who then enters into relationships — but is constituted by its relationships. This view challenges the Western philosophical assumption of the independent, self-subsistent individual that runs from Descartes through Locke through contemporary liberal political philosophy.

But Indigenous traditions are not alone in challenging this assumption. Compare three accounts of the relational self:

Account A: Lakota Relational Ontology. In the framework of Mitákuye Oyásʼiŋ, beings are nodes in a web of relationships. The self is constituted by its relationships with human community, non-human beings, land, ancestors, and spiritual dimensions of reality. The individual "I" is, on this account, a kind of abstraction — not nothing, but not the fundamental unit of reality either.

Account B: Ubuntu Philosophy (Chapter 30). The Nguni Bantu concept "Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu" — a person is a person through other persons — holds that personhood is achieved through and in relationship with other humans. The self is constituted by community recognition, care, and participation. You are not a person and then enter community; you become a person through community.

Account C: Confucian Role-Based Community (Chapter 31). Confucian philosophy holds that personal identity is constituted by one's roles — child, parent, friend, citizen, student — and the relationships those roles involve. To be fully human is to inhabit one's roles well, and those roles are always relational: you are a child only in relation to a parent; a friend only in relation to a friend.

Questions:

1. What are the structural similarities among these three accounts? What does each say about the relationship between individual and community? Where do they converge?

2. What are the significant philosophical differences? Consider: Lakota relational ontology extends the relational constitution of the self to non-human beings and to land — Ubuntu and Confucian accounts are more focused on the human social community. Does this extension make a philosophical difference? What does it add?

3. Which account of the relational self do you find most philosophically compelling? Which best matches your own experience of how relationships constitute who you are?

4. All three accounts challenge the liberal individualist view that individual persons with independent preferences are the fundamental units of ethical and political reasoning. What practical implications follow from each account? Would they generate different answers to a political question — such as whether a community should be able to override an individual's property rights to protect a sacred site?

Exercise 5: Philosophical Dialogue

Dialogue A: Haudenosaunee vs. Liberal Democrat

Imagine a dialogue between a Haudenosaunee political philosopher — someone deeply formed by the Great Law of Peace — and a Western liberal democrat who holds that majority rule, one person one vote, is the most democratic and legitimate form of collective decision-making.

Write the dialogue. The liberal democrat should present the strongest possible case for majority rule: it treats each person equally, it is clear and decisive, it prevents any minority from blocking the will of the majority. The Haudenosaunee philosopher should respond from within the tradition: what does consensus democracy have that majority rule lacks? What philosophical problems does majority rule create that consensus democracy solves? How would the Haudenosaunee philosopher respond to the objection that consensus is too slow, too demanding, too easily blocked by intransigent minorities?

The dialogue should end with both participants having learned something from each other — not with one simply defeating the other.

Dialogue B: Vine Deloria Jr. and a Western Environmentalist

Vine Deloria Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux) has argued that Western environmentalism, even in its most progressive forms, frames its arguments in terms of human welfare — we must protect the environment because humans need clean water, clean air, biodiversity, and so on. He argues this is a continuation of the same anthropocentric philosophy that produced environmental destruction in the first place: it still treats nature as instrumentally valuable (valuable because it's useful for us), rather than relationally significant (significant because we are in relationship with it and relationship creates obligation).

Write a dialogue between Vine Deloria Jr. and a progressive Western environmentalist who frames her climate activism in terms of the welfare of future human generations. Deloria's challenge: Is protecting nature for human benefit philosophically different from exploiting nature for human benefit? The environmentalist's response: Can we really make progress on climate change without appealing to human self-interest? Can Deloria's relational framework generate the urgency and coalition-building that environmental advocacy requires?

The dialogue should grapple honestly with the genuine tension: Deloria's philosophical point may be correct, and the political strategy of appealing to human welfare may be more effective. Are these in conflict? What would a Haudenosaunee or Lakota philosopher say about the relationship between getting the philosophy right and getting the politics done?

Exercise 6: The Dinner Party

Imagine you can host a dinner party with three philosophers from this chapter. You have chosen:

Vine Deloria Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux) — philosopher, theologian, and legal scholar whose work in God Is Red and Power and Place laid the foundations for contemporary Indigenous philosophy in academic dialogue with Western thought. Sharp, direct, deeply critical of both colonial institutions and New Age romanticization of Native culture.

Robin Wall Kimmerer (Citizen Potawatomi Nation) — botanist and philosopher whose Braiding Sweetgrass synthesizes plant ecology and Potawatomi philosophical teaching. Known for her warmth and her ability to make complex ideas accessible without simplifying them. Committed both to scientific rigor and to the philosophical wisdom of her tradition.

A scholar of Te Ao Māori — representing the Māori philosophical tradition; let us say she is a philosopher trained both in Western analytic philosophy and in Te Ao Māori, who has worked on the legal personhood of the Whanganui River and on the philosophical implications of whakapapa for contemporary environmental law.

The dinner conversation begins when someone raises the following question: "This chapter is part of a philosophy textbook written primarily for non-Indigenous students. Is that a good thing, a bad thing, or something more complicated?"

Write the dinner conversation. Consider: - Vine Deloria Jr. was deeply ambivalent about the interest of non-Indigenous academics in Native philosophy; he worried about extraction without reciprocity, about "plastic shamanism," about the reduction of complex living traditions to academic bullet points. What would he say? - Robin Wall Kimmerer has deliberately written for broad audiences, hoping to create bridges between Indigenous ways of knowing and Western audiences who need what those traditions offer. What would she say? - The Te Ao Māori scholar might point out that Māori philosophy has been incorporated into New Zealand law and governance with some success — that engagement with non-Māori institutions is not inherently corrupting. What would she say? - What question do they ask each other? What do they disagree about? What do they agree on?

Exercise 7: Progressive Project — Personal Philosophy Checkpoint

At this point in the course, you have been developing your Personal Philosophy across many traditions. It is time to add an Indigenous Philosophy section.

Step 1: Honest Starting Point Before you can engage with Indigenous philosophy on its own terms, you need to map your starting assumptions. Write a brief (one paragraph) description of how you previously thought about nature, land, and the non-human world. Was nature primarily a resource? A backdrop? Something to enjoy on weekends? Did you have a philosophical framework for your relationship to the non-human world, or did you operate without one?

Step 2: The Relational Challenge The central philosophical challenge of this chapter is relational ontology — the view that you are not an independent substance who then enters into relationships, but a node in a web of relations that constitutes who you are. This web, in Lakota, Māori, Anishinaabe, and Andean thought, includes non-human beings, land, and ancestors, not just human community.

Write your response to this challenge: - In what ways does this relational picture match your experience? Can you identify relationships — to place, to the non-human world, to ancestors — that have constituted you in ways you haven't previously framed philosophically? - In what ways does it resist your experience or your other philosophical commitments? If you hold something like a Kantian view that moral standing requires rationality, how do you respond to the Lakota and Māori claims that rivers and plants have philosophical standing? - Does relational ontology require you to revise your views about the self — about what "you" are? What are you willing to revise, and what do you want to hold onto?

Step 3: The Obligation Question The seventh-generation principle, the Honorable Harvest, and ayni all embed a philosophy of obligation — not just to current humans but to future generations, to the land, to the web of relations you participate in.

Apply these frameworks to your own life. What decisions are you currently making or will you make in the next few years that will have consequences seven generations out? What would it mean to apply the Honorable Harvest principles to your consumption of food, energy, and material goods? What does ayni — cosmic reciprocity — suggest about your obligations to the land and community where you live?

Step 4: Limits and Honesty Engaging with Indigenous philosophy as a non-Indigenous person (if you are one) raises real questions about appropriation, about the difference between learning from a tradition and extracting from it. Write honestly about this tension: How do you want to engage with what you have learned in this chapter? What does respectful engagement look like? What would Vine Deloria Jr. say to you about this?

Your Personal Philosophy section should be 600–900 words and should engage honestly with both what resonates and what remains difficult.