Conversing with Some Chickadees: Cautious Acts of Ontological Translation

Abstract

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.

More than Stories, More than Myths: Animal/Human/Nature(s) in Traditional Ecological Worldviews

“…This is precisely how ethnographies of indigenous and traditional peoples become 'stories' and 'accounts' that are not assessed as 'true' or 'false', but truth claims that are 'true for them' or 'true enough'. As I have argued elsewhere, many ethnographers have gone to great lengths to suggest that it does not matter whether these stories are 'true' or not, but only that they are accurate representations of 'what people believe' (Sepie 2014(Sepie , 2016a(Sepie , 2016b. Anthropologist Paul Nadasdy (2007) describes the contradiction as follows:…”