Syllabus Showcase: Environmental Ethics with a North American Indigenous Philosophy Emphasis, Janella Baxter

My Environmental Ethics course includes an extended unit on North American Indigenous philosophy. My interest in this literature is deeply personal. My father is a member of the Choctaw Nation and spent much of his young life living on and off Choctaw Territory in Oklahoma. I’ve learned a lot from him about what Choctaw life was like when he was young (between the 1950s-70s). When I was an undergraduate at Seattle University, I took a number of courses about the history of colonization in the Americas and a Native American philosophy class taught by Jennifer Lisa Vest. Environmental philosophy is at the heart of much North American Indigenous literature. Long before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Indigenous communities were voicing concerns about the serious spiritual and physiological damage, social inequalities, and loss of biodiversity that result from colonialist exploitation of nature. When I started teaching Environmental Ethics at Washington University a few years ago I knew I wanted to include writings by Indigenous authors. I’m proud of the syllabus I have, but it’s taken time, student input, and several tweaks along the way to get it to where it is now.

The unit on North American Indigenous philosophy takes up 3-4 weeks in the middle. The first chunk of the class is a sustained examination of what should be the conceptual framework for environmental policy. So, we begin with philosophical defenses of the wilderness concept, followed by critical replies by Sahotra Sarkar, and the proposal to focus on biodiversity instead. We conclude this section with Carlos Santana’s paper Biodiversity Eliminativism. All of this sets the stage for the weeks on Indigenous philosophy. In our discussions of the wilderness concept and the Wilderness Act, my students confront America’s colonialist history. Sarkar’s work on biodiversity advocates for including indigenous communities in discussions about sustainability and the value of natural landscapes. By the time we finish Santana’s paper, my students are primed for the unit on Native philosophy.

Incorporation of Indigenous literature into a philosophy class poses methodological challenges, only a few of which I have space to discuss. To begin with, there is very little Indigenous philosophy in the analytical or continental traditions. Much of it is implicit in first-person narratives, literature, art, history, and journalism. A further problem is that Indigenous philosophy is far from homogenous. There is an argument to be made that I should be saying “Indigenous philosophies” and “North American Indigenous thinking.” There are hundreds of tribes across the U.S. alone, each of which has its own origin story and connection with the land. This presents a problem for generalizing about Indigenous thought and values. Another challenge is that much of Indigenous philosophy is deeply informed by the history of colonization. So, to properly understand Indigenous philosophy, I believe one must have an adequate grasp of this history – which most students lack. Finally, there is a deep question about how to engage with the material. When teaching traditional philosophical treatises, it is standard to break down complex concepts, extract premises and conclusions, and foster intensive scrutiny. Because very little Indigenous philosophy is presented in an analytical fashion, many of these strategies are not easily available to the teacher. Moreover, the way a teacher fosters critical evaluation of ideas must be approached with great care as there is a risk of allowing colonist perspectives to take over the conversation. I structure my course in ways to tackle these issues.

First, I open the unit with a lecture on the history of colonization in the U.S. and Canada. I adopt James Wilson’s argument in The Earth Shall Weep that the history of U.S. settler policy has always been marred by ambivalence. This sets the class up to read Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit – a historical fiction about the ramifications of the Dawes Act on the Osage people in the 1920s. When I first taught Environmental Ethics, I did not include this book in my curriculum. This was because I classified Mean Spirit as literature – not philosophy. After my first semester I realized this was a mistake. My students had so little acquaintance with Indigenous perspectives that I felt they did not have even a cursory understanding of the deep ambivalence that colonized groups experience. By “ambivalence” here I follow the historian Inga Clendinnen’s concept in her book Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan. Clendinnen argues that colonization commonly results in colonized communities both conforming to and resisting the colonizer’s culture. Mean Spirit is a powerful way to make this lesson (among many others) vivid to students.

I try to tackle the issue of heterogeneity in Indigenous philosophy by assigning readings from diverse tribes. Winona LaDuke’s book All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life is exceptionally useful on this front. Each chapter is devoted to a different tribe and its environmental struggles in the U.S. and Canada. I also assign writings by Kyle Powys Whyte who writes as a member of Potawatomi Nation as well as a piece by Melanie Bowman about an ongoing controversy between the Anishinaabe and University of Minnesota agriculture scientists. I use these readings to prompt explicit discussion about the diversity of Indigenous experiences as well as a way to extrapolate commonalities across tribes.

My approach to fostering student engagement with this literature is to structure the unit around the virtue of curiosity rather than critical scrutiny. I explain to my students that there is very little formal philosophical work unpacking the concepts and arguments implicit in the readings we study. So, I make it our job in the classroom to extrapolate and interpret the philosophical content of the texts we study. This raises a further pedagogical challenge – how to evaluate students’ acquisition of skills and understanding of the material? Because the literature is nonstandard, I’ve taken the approach of having nonstandard methods of assessment. Instead of assigning papers or exams on the content of this unit, I assign projects. In the past, I’ve had students complete creative projects that are inspired by one or more themes studied in the unit. While my students and I enjoy this project, it is exceptionally hard to hold students accountable for their understanding of the material. So, recently I began assigning students the Manoomin Controversy Project based on Melanie Bowman’s paper “Institutions and Solidarity: Wild Rice Research, Relationships, and the Commodification of Knowledge.” This project tasks the students with the job of acting as conservation biologists who must formulate policy recommendations on how to adjudicate the controversy between the Anishinaabe and the University of Minnesota.

My syllabus has undergone a number of revisions since I began teaching this course. Some of the most significant revisions have been spurred by student responses to the class. Initially, I was not prepared at how hungry students are for a serious, intensive study of Indigenous perspectives. Student enthusiasm for the material has prompted me to consolidate all the readings into a single unit, when before I had the readings scattered throughout the semester. I’ve also increased the number of readings on the topic. The impression I get from my students is that they are eager for creative solutions to the climate crisis, and they see Indigenous thought (or thinking) as a rich source of novel (at least from the perspective of colonial settlers) and promising answers. I also get the sense that students view the study of Indigenous perspectives as a (partial) remedy to ongoing epistemic injustice. I’m sure my students would appreciate an entire semester devoted to Indigenous environmental philosophy. It seems like my syllabus is going in that direction.

The Syllabus Showcase of the APA Blog is designed to share insights into the syllabi of philosophy educators. We include syllabi in their original, unedited format that showcase a wide variety of philosophy classes.  We would love for you to be a part of this project. Please contact Series Editor, Dr. Matt Deaton via MattDeaton.com or Editor of the Teaching Beat, Dr. Sabrina D. MisirHiralall via sabrinamisirhiralall@apaonline.org with potential submissions.

Janella Baxter

Janella Baxter is a philosopher of science and full-time lecturer at Washington University in St. Louis.