Philosophy and Aboriginal Rights: Critical Dialogues

Sandra Tomsons and Lorraine Mayer eds., Philosophy and Aboriginal Rights: Critical Dialogues. Oxford: OUP Canada, 2013. 512 pages. ISBN 978-0-195-43130-8. $70.95 paperback.There is reason to believe that we have entered on a new sort of relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people (and peoples) in Canada. Some of these reasons are social or political, as in the increased profile of Aboriginal persons in various professional fields or the serious attention which a group such as Idle No More has received. Other reasons are more philosophical and involve the expression of uniquely Aboriginal perspectives on abstract issues and problems. Recognition of Native philosophy as a distinct sub-class of the discipline of philosophy is in its infancy, but while Aboriginal persons may be informed as to the content of these unique perspectives by virtue of being Aboriginal, non-Aboriginals are usually at a loss. There are not many sources to which one can turn for Native philosophy outside of Dennis McPherson and J. Douglas Rabb's Indian From the Inside: Native American Philosophy and Cultural Renewal (2nd ed., McFarland 2011) and Anne Waters's anthology American Indian Thought: Philosophical Essays (Wiley-Blackwell 2003). Aside from these, there is scant literature that would permit interested non-Aboriginal scholars to enter into dialogue with their Native counterparts or colleagues. It is this lack which Tomsons and Mayer's Philosophy and Aboriginal attempts to make good, at least with respect to the political and moral issue stated in its title. So this book is, I think, a welcome one.Fairness of representation requires exchange, and Tomsons and Mayer try to model this dialogue in their conversations which conclude each of the four parts into which the book is divided. Tomsons takes the position of the non-Aboriginal philosopher and Mayer the As artificial as this approach is, nevertheless it is still a step in the right direction. Further, the spiritual grandfathers of the project, Dennis McPherson and Douglas Rabb, provide a prologue for the work, cheekily titled to Any Further Discussion of That May be Considered Aboriginal. The other contributors to the volume also seem to exemplify this spirit of dialogue because twelve of the twenty-nine contributors identify themselves as being Aboriginal or as having Aboriginal ancestry. The division of the book into sections - on the relation of Indigenous philosophy to Aboriginal rights, on the content of those rights, on the notion of Aboriginal sovereignty, and on possible avenues for reconciliation of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal views on these matters - is entirely appropriate and just what one should expect from something that purports to make heard the previously-silent Native voices on these issues.However, there are important deficiencies in this edited volume that cannot be ignored. For one, the quality of the papers is very un- even. Indeed, despite the attempts to articulate some clear notion of Aboriginal philosophy by McPherson and Rabb in their Prolegomena and Tomsons and Mayer in their General Introduction, it's not clear how, for example, Janice Green's What Mauchibinesse Taught Me about Aboriginal Rights can be seen as philosophy. While inclusion of such work is not a serious defect because non-academic contributors will sometimes fail to hit the expected note, it is nevertheless illustrative of a certain immaturity (for lack of a better term) in the subdiscipline of Aboriginal or Native or Indigenous philosophy itself. The same deficiency, for instance, can be observed in Anne Waters's American Indian Thought. Yet it is no aid to the discipline to include as representative cases material that is not clearly philosophical in character. Rabb and McPherson's efforts notwithstanding, treating a descriptive account of one's heritage as phenomenological conflates the distinction between ethnography and philosophy. …

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