There is a Western myth that the Aztecs used to sacrifice a person every day so that the sun would continue to rise on the morn. Whether or not this explanation for Aztec sacrifice is true or not is not something to be taken up here, but it does serve to analogize the ways in which Native lives and worldviews are sacrificed every day for the Western Settler world to see the new dawn. The violence of sacrifice is intricate, it is religious, it is beyond words, but, most importantly, it defines a relationship as inherently antagonistic. Every Native life saved, every Native culture preserved is a day without sun in the empire of the Settler, a day where the crops fail, where the gears of industry grind to a halt, a day of the dead. The corporal
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In fact, when looking at the book in its entirety, it becomes clear that the cosmology of the book overwhelms the plot itself. The agential nature of objects, the non-Aristotelian logic concerning creation stories and the prominence of stories-as-truth shapes the novel so deeply that one could even think of it as a case-study for pan-Indigenous perspective. King’s focus on the personified nature of objects (specifically water) reveals the Amerindian perspective at the heart of his novel. While the telos of knowledge, for Western modernity, is to objectify in order to know, the Amerindian inverts this ideal: one must personify to know. Understanding objects as simply insufficiently personified subjects who make choices clashes with Western ways of knowing on the most fundamental level because it disarticulates the notions of private property and the dominion of man over creation. Eli Stands Alone’s respect for the natural river that is blocked by the dam that he is fighting represents this and is where he finds the moral authority to constantly refuse to sell. This anthropomorphic tendency in Indigenous thought to understand the natural rights of things and their ability to make choices not only disturbs Western forms of thought, but takes out the basis for their coherence (Viveiros de Castro 60-61). This difference, …show more content…
Joe Billy proclaims that “[t]he Indian world is on a collision course with the white world... They are waging war with Earth” (Hogan 13). By having a reverend make this observation, Hogan makes clear the ways that American cultural values are overwhelmingly secular and how they clash with the spiritual relationships that Amerindians have with the world. Furthermore, she inherently defines the White world as have a militaristic relationship to the natural world and makes synonymous the Indian world with the Earth. The fact that Hogan understands the White world as inherently engaged with war against the earth displays the way in which the antagonistic relationship manifests in its ontological form. Hogan continues to display this antagonism when she writes about the clashes in the spiritual world of the Indian and the Settler. When Michael Horse consults a priest about getting the Biblical book he wrote, The Book of Horse, added to the Bible, he states that “[t]he Bible is full of mistakes” and he wants to correct them, citing as one of its principle mistakes that the Bible doesn’t say that “all living things are equal” (Hogan 273). The dehierarchization of Indigenous relationships to the world challenges Western monotheism and, as Vine Deloria, Jr, writes, can be thought of as “a continuous conflict of two mutually exclusive religious views of the
In fact, when looking at the book in its entirety, it becomes clear that the cosmology of the book overwhelms the plot itself. The agential nature of objects, the non-Aristotelian logic concerning creation stories and the prominence of stories-as-truth shapes the novel so deeply that one could even think of it as a case-study for pan-Indigenous perspective. King’s focus on the personified nature of objects (specifically water) reveals the Amerindian perspective at the heart of his novel. While the telos of knowledge, for Western modernity, is to objectify in order to know, the Amerindian inverts this ideal: one must personify to know. Understanding objects as simply insufficiently personified subjects who make choices clashes with Western ways of knowing on the most fundamental level because it disarticulates the notions of private property and the dominion of man over creation. Eli Stands Alone’s respect for the natural river that is blocked by the dam that he is fighting represents this and is where he finds the moral authority to constantly refuse to sell. This anthropomorphic tendency in Indigenous thought to understand the natural rights of things and their ability to make choices not only disturbs Western forms of thought, but takes out the basis for their coherence (Viveiros de Castro 60-61). This difference, …show more content…
Joe Billy proclaims that “[t]he Indian world is on a collision course with the white world... They are waging war with Earth” (Hogan 13). By having a reverend make this observation, Hogan makes clear the ways that American cultural values are overwhelmingly secular and how they clash with the spiritual relationships that Amerindians have with the world. Furthermore, she inherently defines the White world as have a militaristic relationship to the natural world and makes synonymous the Indian world with the Earth. The fact that Hogan understands the White world as inherently engaged with war against the earth displays the way in which the antagonistic relationship manifests in its ontological form. Hogan continues to display this antagonism when she writes about the clashes in the spiritual world of the Indian and the Settler. When Michael Horse consults a priest about getting the Biblical book he wrote, The Book of Horse, added to the Bible, he states that “[t]he Bible is full of mistakes” and he wants to correct them, citing as one of its principle mistakes that the Bible doesn’t say that “all living things are equal” (Hogan 273). The dehierarchization of Indigenous relationships to the world challenges Western monotheism and, as Vine Deloria, Jr, writes, can be thought of as “a continuous conflict of two mutually exclusive religious views of the