How we as human persons understand and relate to the world has long been fodder for contention. 

In the pursuit of absolute, universal truths, the occidental philosophical canon has found itself in a rigid dogmatism that casts out the roles of spirituality, land, and the-more-than-human-world in the formation of our understanding of reality. With this dogmatic commitment to the exclusion of the spiritual, the embodied and the particular–sharpened and spread through violent conquest–the space to offer and have taken seriously other non-western frameworks for knowing and being in the world has been severely reduced. 

Ontological and epistemic frameworks cultivated by those subjected to settler colonialism become mere “folk understandings,” loose “cosmologies,” or “alternate philosophies.” These non western frameworks for knowing find themselves always measured against settler colonial logics that inevitably place them as secondary, partial, in comparison to the grand totalitizing projects of western philosophy. 

What this symposium aims to accomplish, is a demonstration of the merit and stand alone importance of Indigenous Philosophies across the Americas. This gathering of scholarship celebrates the ontological and epistemic frameworks produced by Indigenous peoples not as mere “alternate philosophies,” but as themselves structures and questions that map to the realities of how human persons know and be in the world in ways western hegemonic Philosophy continuously fails to. 

KEYNOTE
James Maffie, Senior Lecturer, Emeritus, Department of History, University of Maryland
A Mexica Metaphysics of Transformative Becoming

SPEAKERS
Natalie Avalos, Assistant Professor, Ethnic Studies, University of Colorado, Boulder
Getty L. Lustila, Assistant Teaching Professor of Philosophy and Religion; Associate Director of the Humanities Center; Northeastern University
Zenón Depaz Toledo, Professor and Chair, Department of Philosophy, Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos