Reason and rationality, upon which modern, westernized, societies have been founded, have powerfully characterized the nature of human relations with other species and with the natural world. However, countless indigenous and traditional worldviews tell of a very different reality in which humans, conceived of as instinctual and intuitive, are a part of a complex web of ecological relationships. Other species, elements of the natural world, and people are active participants in relations overflowing with communications, interactions sometimes recorded in ethnographies, or as 'myths' and 'stories'. The present article draws upon a range of traditions to explore the biases which shape how indigenous and traditional life-ways are represented in westernized contexts; the phenomenon of receiving direct insight or intuitive knowing from more-than-human worlds; and the numerous valuable understandings regarding the nature of the human being, other species, and how to live well, that are offered by a deeper comprehension of different worldviews. I also argue that the various capacities for instinctual and intuitive knowledge which accompanies these life-ways are endemic to the human species yet overlooked, the correction of which might work to usefully recalibrate our ethical relations with each other, and with other life on earth.
Much of the time, academics consider questions about spirits, dreams, or the personhood of animals, but go to great lengths to state that it “doesn’t matter” whether these stories are “true” or not; only that they are accurate representations of “what people believe.” This essay explores the challenges and promise offered by taking truth seriously through the discussion of translation between Euroamerican and Native cosmologies, ontologies, and worldviews, primarily by using the tool of cosmological interrogation , which proposes multiple, self-reflexive inquiries into incommensurate classificatory systems, charter myths and truth claims. Furthermore, as insufficient hospitality toward indigenous cultures has resulted in the obfuscation and denigration of other ways of knowing as non-scientific, supernatural, animist, ill-informed, or fictional, this essay calls for a reevaluation of hospitality in light of the decolonial project, and a reconsideration of indigenous metaphysics, conceptions of personhood, relational thinking, and intuitive ways of knowing and being.
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