Ways of Thinking

My birth represents a collision between my tribal ancestry in the Diné Nation and in the Western world, and my life has been a struggle to create meaning out of these two cultures. On my mother's side, I am from the clan, Maììdeeshgizhnìì, which translates into English as Coyote Pass Clan. My matrilineal grandfather comes from Tábááhá, the Water's Edge Clan. In all there are sixty-one clans from the matrilineal side, although, over time, many of them have become extinct. Beyond the immediate clans, I am related to three other clans, The Honey Comb Rock People, Salt Clan, and Black Sheep Clan. My matrilineal heritage means that my mother and her people have been the focus of my learning and my cultural grounding. However, I also live within the strong and enriching influence of my father, whose origins are deeply rooted in colonization. Though I have inherited values from both my mother and my father, I identify most intimately with my mother whose matrilineal traditions have shaped my ontological commitments and my metaphysical beliefs.

The word Diné translates into English as "The People." Diné does not belong to any one particular group. Instead, the concept of the word is intended to be complete and all-inclusive. Words, themselves, are not the subject at hand but rather the pretext for understanding how two worlds have collided. In this collision, the so-called Western world reveals how it has lost its Diné, which, to The People, represents a loss of being. Without Diné, without a word for Diné, the westerners exist without real meaning.

Philosophy endeavors to create meaning out of lived experiences and to uphold the idea that "A philosopher is a man who never ceases to experience, see, hear, suspect, hope, and dream extraordinary things" (Frederick Nietzsche). The nature and scope of the search for meaning are bounded, apriori, in the cultural context in which these terms are explored. In her essay, On Authenticity, Dine philosopher Marilyn Notah Verney asks three questions about Native American Philosophy: What is it? How can outsiders study it? How can it contribute to traditional academic philosophy? These three questions have informed my academic work and my personal experiences.

Western philosophy tends to take apart, taking apart what is to distinguish what is, from what is not. By this we tend to lose meaning by losing relation with all surrounding things. The difference between the western philosophy and Native metaphysical and ontological ideas are that Natives have an innate reverence to the land. Physis, as Heidegger states, is a Greek word meaning nature. It is this physis the west has lost touch with. In order to understand Diné it is imperative to understand physis.

Verney explains that in order to understand the differences one needs to look at the relation Diné have with the earth. One noticeable difference is how physis is not to be taken and owned. Earth is a living being to be respected as the mother. The mother who gives life, the mother who rejuvenates, the mother that disciplines its children by its unpredictable weather. We come from the earth, from she who fed us in the same way we are fed as babies at our mothers' breast.

Traditionally, Native Americans related to the natural world philosophically; that is, our philosophy is about relationships between person and nature. Verney states, "if non-Natives can understand our traditional spiritual relationship with the land and its connection within the universe, that all things have life, then one can better understand our people, our culture, and our traditional beliefs". We know that to fully grasp a particular culture, it's important to know that creation stories reveal much about a culture's metaphysics. In the context of creation stories, most Native Americans believe in a starting point, and, in most cases, that starting point is mother earth.

Diné belief starts with animals and spiritual beings developing in the womb of the great mother. The creation legend of the Diné includes an account of the three worlds. The great flood forced animals and spiritual beings to climb through a hollow reed to the surface of the Mother Earth to escape the rising water. To the dismay of the inhabitants of the surface world, the water did not subside. Knowing coyote and his mischievous ways, the spiritual beings First Man and First Woman confronted coyote – because they knew that coyote wonders about things, and how they really work. First Man and First Woman found that coyote had taken two of the water monster's babies. Coyote was instructed to return the water monster's babies. Soon after the water began to recede, revealing the surface of Mother Earth.

Our oral tradition has formed our philosophical metaphysics, and by stories like this that teach us the way of being. The things around us, in our experience and the things to which we are most directly related are our teachers. It is this respect that sustains our life. Verney states, "Everything that sustains life is within our reach, for we sustain and are sustained by life, which is given to us by our Mother. Therefore, our universe and land are sacred, holy, and to be treated with respect. "

The base of metaphysics is developed by respect, "the metaphysics of respect." As one would prostrate himself or herself before a god in obedience, so the Diné show common kindness and caring towards Physis. By this we find our place in the universe. As Diné have co-existed with colonizers, new concepts and abstractions have flowed into the picture. These abstractions make our commitment to physis, to nature, more real and urgent. However we struggle to describe the universe without reference to western concepts of time or space – Our philosophy, our metaphysics, requires a language that is not represented in European/American traditions. In the end, these western philosophical traditions are impoverished as they lack adequate terms for our experience of everything from creation to the seasons.

In fact, western philosophy considers Native practices and beliefs – our metaphysics – to be animistic or vitalistic. These colonial philosophers characterize us as primitive and thus avoid developing a language for representing those transcendental unifications of experience and those intuitions of things unseen, but felt by consciousness – the deeply felt experiences of Diné.

The world as we know it has been put in John Locke's idea, "where there is no property there is no injustice". Property has become the focus of our society, "the reason why men enter into society is the preservation of their property," and ownership of the land in turn results in the loss of a relationship and intimacy with nature.

Native American thought has been in consistent confrontation with Euro/Am philosophy, a philosophy steeped in its politics, economics, and religion. Not much room for compromise, only a foundation that must be upheld at any expense. The way in which young Natives are raised – in public schools, on reservations, in boarding schools – alienates us from nature and thus from our metaphysical roots. Their schooling white washes our traditions and denies the fact that we come from a tradition where all of us are philosophers, all of us are Diné.

Martin Heidegger along with Friedrich Nietzsche are but a few European philosophers who hold analogous views to Diné. Heidegger's Dasein reveals how an individual can perceive it:

Many things which we designate as seined, and we do so in various sense. Everything we talk about, everything we have in view, everything towards which we comport ourselves in any way, is being; what we are is being, and so is how we are. Being lies in the fact that something is, and in its Being as it is; in Reality; in presence-at-hand; in subsistence; in validity; in Dasein; in the "there is."

To know and/or relate to Diné it is important to know Being, revealing true self, a re-emergence to authenticity. "Dasein is in each case essentially its own possibility; it can, in its very Being, choose itself and win itself. It can also lose itself and never win itself; or only seem to do so" It is important to know the difference between Being and otherness, Heidegger explains:

In one's concern with what one has taken hold of, whether with, for, or against, the Other, there is constant care as to the way one differs from them, whether that difference is merely one that is to be evened out, whether one's own Dasein has lagged behind the Others and wants to catch up in relationship to them, or whether one's Dasein already has some priority over them and sets out to keep them suppressed. The care about this distance between them is disturbing to Bing-with-one-another, though this disturbance is one that is hidden from it."

Verney asks, "do American Indians have to continue to follow a philosophy of the 'Other?'" Is the "Other" forgetting the ways of its Diné (authentic)? Heidegger proceeds:

This Being-with-one-another dissolves one's own Dasein completely into the kind of Being of "the Other," in such a way, indeed, that the Others, as distinguishable and explicit, vanish more and more. In this inconspicuousness and unascertainable, the real dictatorship of the “they" is unfolded. We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they take pleasure; we read, see, and judge about literature, and art as they see and judge; likewise we shrink back from the 'great mass' as they shrink back; we find 'shocking' what they find shocking. The 'they,' which is nothing definite, and which all are, though not as the sum, prescribe the kind of Being of everydayness.

Friedrich Nietzsche, a man of authenticity and one who held not only creativity at the fore but also nature as its god, states, 'for the will would rather will nothing than not to well at all.' In his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Zarathustra comes down from the mountain to announce the death of God and the possibility of self-healing. This self-healing could be interpreted as the return, eternal, of the people to nature.

Nietzsche believed that a religion which glorified unconditional love and suffering, god on the cross, left humans weak and incapable of dealing with the necessarily aggressive aspects of life. Though much compassion was shown by Native Americans there was never one dogma that was to be upheld. This will to power or the psychological and metaphysical philosophy of creative nature was used as an inspiration to achieve a creative being, or as Zarathustra would have it the Ubermensch.

As Zarathustra wanders his mountain and gathers representations of humanity he ponders his surroundings. As he makes it back to his cave and tends to all his guests he walks out to perhaps ponder one last time. As he reflects, all of natures beings come and join. One might see here that Zarathustra was or finally reached the state of Ubermensch.

The search for meaning is framed in the cultural context in which these terms are explored. Native American and Western European trends vary widely from one another, yet also manifest striking similarities of thought with regard to some European thinkers. Native Americans reflect on physis or nature as interconnectedness to relate and respect as did Nietzsche, and Heidegger. Their philosophies merit further examination vis-à-vis Native thought and critical analyses of humanity's relation or lack thereof to the earth and the beings that inhabit it.

Dyami Allen was born on the Navajo reservation and raised in Salt Lake City, UT. Mr Allen studied philosophy and constitutional law at The Evergreen State Collage in Olympia, WA. After completing his undergraduate studies he moved to New York City to pursue graduate work at NYU, health policy.

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