Thinking in place: Comments on Scott Pratt's Native Pragmatism

Abstract

Native Pragmatism by Scott Pratt joins a small but significant body of work by philosophers dealing with Native American thought. It is one of the first major works by a professional philosopher to address directly the question of Native American Philosophy since 1953, when The World’s Rim by Hartley Burr Alexander appeared, fourteen years after his death. There have been of course, philosophical works on Native American subjects by people outside professional philosophy itself, including many works by Native writers, like Vine Deloria Jr., or by anthropologists like Dennis Tedlock. But the problems and issues of Native people writing about their own traditions or of anthropologists writing about other peoples’ traditions are different from those of philosophers. First, at the core of Western philosophy’s own “myth” of its origins is that it begins with a rejection of myth and its “tradition” has been to critique tradition. Thus world-views that operate comfortably within the symbolism of myth and exhibit reverence toward tradition are almost excommunicate from the start. Second, Anglo-American philosophy has so over-whelmed other modes of reflective praxis in the English-speaking world with its various scientistic paradigms, that anything dealing with deep issues of embedded cultural thinking, philosophical anthropology, or pluralistic modes of meaning and rationality are not even on the “map” of Philosophy. Finally, there is the subculture of “American Philosophy” which has its own myth and tradition of its origins within European philosophy and which has, in spite of its commitments to pluralism, “lived experience,” and culturally contextualized reflection, resisted the idea of “Native American Philosophy” as part of its own project. Native Pragmatism is a direct challenge to this last set of assumptions, as will be evident as I give a synopsis of the book’s main arguments and appeals to evidence. Before I do so, I want to ask you to reflect a moment on what it means to “do” philosophy here in North America—that is to say upon the ground of a holocaust far more dreadful than any seen since. Is it not “disembodied” in time and place to pretend