“World”-Traveling in Tule Canoes: Indigenous Philosophies of Language and an Ethic of Incommensurability

Abstract

Indigenous language activists talk about incommensurability all the time—in interesting ways that link language and knowledge as components of Indigenous lifeways that can't be disentangled. According to many of these scholar-activists, what is untranslatable about Indigenous languages is often what is incommensurate about Indigenous worlds. Drawing upon resources from Indigenous language-reclamation work, I outline here a nonexhaustive taxonomy of incommensurability in the literature about Indigenous philosophy of language, and gesture at the ways coalitional relationships might be built that hold space for these different varieties of incommensurability. For ease of explication and to honor Indigenous ways of knowing, I employ here an organizational metaphor rooted in my own communities’ traditions of canoe-voyaging to organize three forms of incommensurability that emerge from Indigenous philosophies of language: impassable incommensurability and strategic impassable incommensurability (big water through a rock garden), as well as incommensurability with technical passage: (heavy water through a rock garden). These forms of incommensurability, as they spring from Indigenous philosophies of language, lend themselves toward nuanced insights for careful and considerate world-traveling (à la Lugones) that holds space for epistemic and linguistic sovereignty.