Thinking from the Land: on the idea

#thinkingfromtheland #brianyazzieburkhart #indigenousphilosophy

This Is the inaugural post of the Thinking from the Land Blog, so I wanted to introduce readers to the concept of thinking from the land.

We do not often associating the concepts of ”thinking” with the concept of “land,” particularly in the context of a post-Cartesian framework of thought that views thinking as connected to the category of mind and land as connected to the category of body. Mind/body dualism holds that the mind and the body are completely separate realms of reality that are generally thought to never intersect or interact. So, thinking is naturally seen as separate from anything bodily or physical or material (and the concepts of what is bodily, physical, material are constructed as devoid of thinking, mind, consciousness (whatever these are thought exactly to mean).

Thinking from land, as an idea, exists outside of the idiosyncratic Western tradition that gives rise to these frankly bizarre notions of thinking, mind, body, material, person, land, and so on. It is not a response to those bizarre notions, since it existed before they did and still exists quite apart from them in Indigenous traditions the world over.

The basic idea is that....