V. F. Cordova

V. F. Cordova was a Jicarilla Apache philosopher, described by her publisher as the first Native American woman to earn a PhD in philosophy, which she received from the University of New Mexico. She taught at Oregon State, Colorado State and Idaho State universities. Her essays, collected after her death as How It Is (2007), set out a Native American worldview in which reality is a single unified whole, humans are one part of nature, and ethics concerns how to live well within a particular place and community.

Key ideas

• Reality is one unified whole, a monism, rather than a split between matter and spirit.
• Every culture has a conceptual framework, a set of assumptions about how the world is, which shapes its values.
• Humans are not above nature but one part of it, with responsibilities to the place where they live.
• Ethics is about keeping balance within a community and a land, not obeying commands that hold everywhere.

Major works

• How It Is: The Native American Philosophy of V. F. Cordova (2007)
• The Concept of Monism in Navajo Thought (1992, PhD dissertation)

In the Book corner

• How It Is: The Native American Philosophy of V. F. Cordova 2007 (posthumous) · Intermediate
  A posthumous collection of essays by Viola Cordova, of Jicarilla Apache and Hispanic descent and the first Native American woman to earn…

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