Curiosity Is No Solo Act

The Foucauldian assumption that networks of information precondition ways of thinking, doing, and being has an ancient, rich, and still robust precedent in Indigenous philosophy. Rooted in the wisdom that everything that exists is connected to everything else, Indigenous philosophy foregrounds the vast and complex system of relational networks. While Western philosophy, especially post-Enlightenment, has typically emphasized the individual nodes of knowers and knowns, Indigenous philosophy has consistently contributed to a thinking on the edge, or edgework. (It is not insignificant that the English language is 70 percent nouns, while Potawatomi is 70 percent verbs. Or that Western settlers conceptualize land as private property and commodity capital, while Indigenous peoples understand it as a connective tissue in a larger gift economy.) The difference in ethos between piecemeal and of a piece with could not be more pronounced.

In an Indigenous onto-epistemology, one is always coming to know in intimate relationship with other knowers, including not only community members, but also all the components of the earth itself. In “Braiding Sweetgrass,” Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer tells the story of her own Indigenous curiosity. Growing up surrounded by “shoeboxes of seeds and piles of pressed leaves,” she knew the plants had chosen her. Declaring a botany major in college, she soon learned to stockpile taxonomic names and functional facts, all while letting her capacities to attend to energetic relationships fall into disuse. It was not until rekindling her connections with Indigenous communities — and specifically Indigenous scientists — that she remembered how “intimacy gives us a different way of seeing.” Her scholarship and outreach are now focused on honoring this ray of scientific and social wisdom.

What is perhaps most distinctive about Indigenous philosophy is its imbrication of a relational cosmology with a relational epistemology. At the heart of this worldview is “the eternal convergence of the world within any one thing,” writes Carl Mika, such that “one thing is never alone and all things actively construct and compose it.” From this perspective of deep holism, talk of knowing any one thing is “minimally useful.” As such, knowledge is not properly propositional but instead procedural; it is less concerned with knowing what than with knowing how. And its wisdom lies in “sharing” more than “stating.”

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