How It Is: The Native American Philosophy of V. F. Cordova

A posthumous collection of essays by Viola Cordova, of Jicarilla Apache and Hispanic descent and the first Native American woman to earn a PhD in philosophy. She died in 2002 before finishing her planned account of Native American philosophy, and colleagues edited her writings, published by the University of Arizona Press in 2007. Cordova contrasts Native American thought with the European tradition shaped by the Enlightenment and Christianity, which she calls 'Euroman' philosophy, and questions any view that claims to hold the single truth. After introductory essays on why Native American philosophy is needed, the book is arranged around three questions. What is the world? Here she discusses origins, matter and spirit, time, and the place of culture and language. What is it to be human? She answers that people become human through relationships with a community and a particular place. What is the role of a human in the world? Her answer stresses responsibility, balance and respect, in a world where the sacred and the everyday are not split.

It is one of the few systematic statements of Native American philosophy by a trained philosopher, and it shows clearly how a relational, place-based worldview differs from the Western one.