“Unfolding Futures: Indigenous Ways of Knowing for the Twenty-First Century” is an edited collection of essays that appeared in the Spring 2018 issue of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The contributors are scholars of Indigenous thinking from diverse academic disciplines and professional backgrounds. The project unfolded from conversations after the Standing Rock resistance in 2016-17, when the editors realized that many of their non-Indigenous colleagues had outdated conceptions of Native American life. “They did not know what they did not know about Indigenous life, and they could not begin to imagine Indian people leading non-Native America in any way. (8)” The 14 essays in this collection address this challenge by exploring topics from education, to museums, to American Indian law as well as Indigenous science.
The volume’s introduction maps key themes that recur throughout the essays. Indian people have formal legal and political relationships to the United States that make them unique among other nondominant groups. Indian people are sovereign, with inherent rights to self-determination, and are central to understanding the formation and present state of the United States. Finally, it is vital to understand historical relationships and patterns of American Indian history, but not just to regard Indians through a lens of history, but through a framework of futurity.
Toward that end, scholars such as Kyle Powys Whyte suggest that Indian people offer knowledge and leadership with regard to environmental studies in particular. Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and Indigenous Environmental Science Studies (IESS) should be understood as scientific in and of themselves, and as part of understanding the world that exists in a dialectical relationship with Western science. This relationship, however, must be constructed out of a social justice framework so that existing patterns of colonialism and appropriation are not continued.
The Introduction to “Unfolding Futures” and selected essays in the collection are available through open access. They offer important starting points to issues that are central to Indigenous life and thought, but should not be regarded as the last word on these subjects. Instead, they can be seen as foundational, as starting points for explorations in a number of significant, complex academic and cultural literatures.
Cover of Daedalus, Spring 2018. "Unfolding Futures: Indigenous Ways of Knowing for the Twenty-First Century."
Cover of Daedalus, Spring 2018. "Unfolding Futures: Indigenous Ways of Knowing for the Twenty-First Century."
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