5
An Expansive Conception
of Persons
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This chapter begins with the insightful critique of a prominent Western
conception of persons by Ross Poole, which will nicely frame our development of an American Indian expansive conception of persons. We will find
that human beings are essentially “spirit beings” in a changeable human form
who become persons by virtue of their relationships with and obligations
to other persons in a social group that is more closely related to a family
than to a Western civil society. Unlike Western conceptions, however, we
will see that the Native conception of persons is expansive, for all sorts of
nonhuman spirit beings—ancestors and animals, plants and places, physical forces and cardinal directions, the Sun, Earth, and other powerful spirit
beings—are members of the American Indian familial community, and so
are persons.
A Western Conception of Persons
In Chapter 1 we noted the deeply ingrained Western conviction—reinforced
by science, religion, and common sense—that human beings are different in
kind from other nonhuman animals, but that cultural anthropologists and
ethnographers often observe that American Indian traditions regard human
beings and other nonhuman animals as in some way equal. “They do not
separate man from the beast,” says J. W. Powell (1877), “[s]o the Indian
speaks of ‘our race’ as of the same rank with the bear race, the wolf race
or the rattlesnake race” (10). But we will see that what Powell regards as
a “very curious and interesting fact” is an often-repeated misinterpretation
undoubtedly born of an imposition of Western categories and prejudices on
the American Indian worldview. Instead, I will argue that a recurring theme
in Native traditions is an expansive conception of persons, in which nonhuman animals—and other sorts of other-than-human beings—are recognized
77
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as persons in a sense as or more robust than a Western conception of human
persons. Thus, the value of human beings is not diminished, but the value
of other kinds of entities in the world is enhanced. It is not that “[m]ankind
is supposed simply to be one of the many races of animals” in Native worldviews—as Powell haughtily asserts—but that Indians regard the many races
of animals to be people like humankind:
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Behind the apparent kinship between animals, reptiles, birds,
and human beings in the Indian way stands a great conception
shared by a great majority of the tribes. Other living things
are not regarded as insensitive species. Rather they are “people”
in the same manner as the various tribes of human beings are
people. The reason why the Hopi use live retiles in their ceremony goes back to one of their folk heroes who lived with the
snake people for a while and learned from them the secret of
making rain for the crops. . . . In the same manner the Plains
Indians considered the buffalo as a distinct people, the Northwest Coast Indians regarded the salmon as a people. (Deloria
1994: 89–90)
A Native expansive conception of persons in which not only animals
but plants and places, physical forces and cardinal directions, even the Sun,
Moon, and Earth are persons is clearly different from various Western conceptions in which being human is a necessary condition for personhood.
Indeed, the commonsense notion of a person, as captured by everyday usage,
is telling: A person is “a human being, whether man, woman, or child . . . as
distinguished from an animal or a thing” (“person” 2004). And according to
Irving Hallowell (1960), persons and human beings are categorically identified in psychology and the social sciences (21).
Thankfully, philosophers have been a little more careful and reflective
in their attribution of personhood to or identification of persons with human
beings. In fact, a widely embraced contemporary philosophical view—with
roots in John Locke and Immanuel Kant—has it that being human is not
essential to being a person. After rehearsing the historical and conceptual
development of this view, Ross Poole (1996) poses an interesting Hegelian
sort of challenge that will shed light both on the Western and American
Indian conceptions of a person.
Poole argues that John Locke’s notion of a person entrenched an earlier Hobbesian conception, which was informed in turn by an even older
Roman notion that to be a person is to take on a public role—to be a full
subject of the law and thereby have legal rights and duties, as well as to
have the right to participate in certain public rituals and ceremonies (39).
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An Expansive Conception of Persons
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Hobbes’ transitional view incorporates this older notion that a person is one
who has the legal right to act on the public stage with the dawning idea
that a person is also “the inner being of the agent who occupied the role,”
as Poole puts it. Thus, Hobbes melds the earlier tradition that rights and
obligations are grounded in one’s person qua public entity with the idea that
“person” refers to some intrinsic nature of the one playing that public role
(40). It seems, then, that Hobbes began to combine the two components of
personhood that Daniel Dennett (1978) finds in John Locke’s later account,
namely, a moral notion and a metaphysical notion.
In developing the metaphysical component of personhood, Locke
(1991) famously distinguishes the idea of a person from the idea of a man
(i.e., a human animal). The identity of a man over time is understood as
“the same Animal . . . the same continued Life communicated to different
Particles of Matter, as they happen successively to be united to that organiz’d
living Body” (332–33). On the other hand, Locke proposes that any selfreflective rational being can be a person, and that the identity of a person
over time is a function of a being’s conscious identification of recollected
past selves with its present self:
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[T]o find wherein personal Identity consists, we must consider
what Person stands for; which, I think, is a thinking intelligent
Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider it self
as it self, the same thinking thing in different times and places;
which it does only by that consciousness, which is inseparable
for thinking, and as it seems to me essential to it. (335)
However, Locke also is concerned about the legal and moral responsibilities and rewards incurred by and due to persons—just as Hobbes was—
and he locates these in a second moral component of personhood, where,
as Dennett observes, the metaphysical notion of a person as a special kind
of self-reflective rational being appears to be a necessary condition for that
being’s moral accountability. For, one can take credit or blame for some
past action only if one appropriates the past action as one’s own—and that
requires consciously identifying a past self with the present self:
[“Person”] is a Forensick Term appropriating Actions and their
Merit; and so belongs only to intelligent Agents capable of a Law,
and Happiness and Misery. This personality extends it self beyond
present Existence to what is past, only by consciousness, whereby
it becomes concerned and accountable, owns and imputes to it
self past Actions, just upon the same ground, and for the same
reason, that it does the present. (Locke 1991: 346)
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Poole (1996) nicely summarizes the Lockean person as the self-conscious, language using, corporeal, rational being who is “cognizant of and
thus subject to the demands of law and morality”—an amalgam of the metaphysical and moral notions—but not the human organism at all. As such,
in Locke’s view not all human beings are persons; and, Poole importantly
observes, “it is at least conceptually possible that some nonhuman animals
might be counted as persons” (40–41).
The distinction between persons and human beings is more sharply
drawn by Kant, who developed the concept of a person as a moral agent
wholly independent of actual facts about human beings. Moral laws are
universal and necessary, so they cannot be mere empirical generalizations we
might make about actual human behavior, since an empirical generalization
can be falsified by a single disconfirming instance. However, moral laws are
never falsified by actual human actions and circumstances; despite the fact
that human beings actually murder, the moral imperative “Thou shalt not
murder” is still true and necessarily binding on all moral agents—that is,
binding on all persons. Now, the only way Kant (1964) can account for such
universal, apodictic imperatives—and a person’s categorical duty to obey
them—is by ignoring altogether the contingencies arising from particular
human desires and inclinations, and grounding the moral law in reason. As
such, the moral law is necessarily binding not just on human beings, but
also on any rational creature whatsoever:
Every one must admit that a law has to carry with it absolute
necessity if it is to be valid morally—valid, that is, as a ground
of obligation; that the command “Thou shalt not lie” could not
hold merely for men, other rational beings having no obligation
to abide by it—and similarly with all other genuine moral laws;
that here consequently the ground of obligation must be looked
for, not in the nature of man nor in the circumstances of the
world in which he is placed, but solely a priori in the concepts
of pure reason. (57)
So, as Poole observes, it is not the contingencies of our actual human
nature or situation that makes us persons in Kant’s view. Reason makes us
persons; and by virtue of our reason—imperfect though it may be—we are
creatures with an intrinsic value. So, Kant identifies our rational nature as
what we are essentially, and he abstracts that which is essential to us—our
personhood—from our humanity (44–45).
After tracing the development of the view that being human is
not essential to personhood through contemporary philosophers Frankfurt
(1971), Dennett (1976), and Nerlich (1989), Poole (1996) argues that
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An Expansive Conception of Persons
81
something has gone awry: Philosophers in the Lockean/Kantian tradition
begin by identifying certain features they take to be essential to personhood—perhaps moral agency, self-consciousness, or rationality—and then
observe that not every human being has that essential feature, so being
human is not sufficient for being a person. Nor is it necessary, for one
can imagine other sorts of nonhuman beings with these essential features.
Therefore, they conclude, being human is neither necessary nor sufficient
for personhood; being a person is thus wholly abstracted from a particular
kind of existence—a human existence (46–47).
Poole proposes instead that the interesting sorts of features various
philosophers have identified that distinguish persons from other kinds of
things—moral agency, rationality, language use, and self-awareness among
them—arose from, hence cannot be understood apart from, a specific kind of
organic, social life that gave rise to them in the first place. Self-consciousness—Locke’s criterion of personhood—is an embodied human self-consciousness; rationality—Kant’s criterion—is an embodied human rationality;
moral agency—their common concern—is a human moral agency constituted by a human being’s actual participation in a network of human social
and political practices and relationships. Indeed, one’s personal identity is
a special kind of social identity. Ignoring this, Poole (1996) argues, leads
to the “calamitous consequence” in moral philosophy that persons, as the
bearers of moral rights and responsibilities, are abstracted from the very
concrete, human situations that engender moral dilemmas in the first
place—including abortion, capital punishment, euthanasia, and consuming nonhuman animals (48–51). Our attention is instead drawn toward
concerns about our moral obligations to Vulcans, machines passing the
Turing test or any similar nonhuman “persons” in the fantasy world of
thought experiments.
Importantly, Poole (1996) argues against the metaphysical notion that
personhood—however conceived—is our essential being, because there are
all sorts of interesting features about human beings besides the usual candidates for personhood that could reasonably serve as the core of a conception
of persons, so no one of them should be identified as that which is essential
to being human:
Cognitive scientists, for example, may be more impressed with
our capacity to draw and evaluate certain kinds of inference,
than the fact that we can dance or make love, so they construct
a concept of a person on the basis of these preferred attributes.
In itself this move is harmless enough, and may even be useful
in certain contexts. But we should be wary of assuming that this
concept signifies what we most essentially are. (55–56)
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Likewise, we should be wary of the seemingly plausible proposals that
our essential being is constituted by personhood construed as self-awareness,
rationality, or moral agency—even participating in a certain kind of social
and moral life. Because there are so many attributes that could serve as
the core of personhood, identifying any one attribute as our essential being
is unjustified.
Perhaps remarkably, we will find elements of Poole’s Western development of the concept of a person in our consideration of an American Indian
expansive conception of personhood. First, human beings are not persons
by nature; that which makes them persons cannot be abstracted from a
particular, concrete kind of existence. Human beings become persons—and
sustain their identity as persons—by virtue of their participation in certain
forms of social practices and performances, and through their relationships
with and obligations to other persons. Second, the social practices and performances, relationships and obligations that engender and sustain human
beings as persons are moral in nature, that is, moral agency is at the core of
personhood. Finally, being a person is not what is essential to being human.
However, we will see that these three elements are entirely consistent with
the view that there are nonhuman persons!
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Native Conceptions of Animate Beings and Persons
We begin with the now familiar traditional Native story of “Coyote, Iktome,
and the Rock,” told by Jenny Leading Cloud (Erdoes and Ortiz 1984). It
has versions in at least the Lakota, Blackfoot, and Apache traditions, and it
has even slipped into popular Western culture. It will serve as a touchstone
as we clarify the American Indian notion of a human being as an animate
being, the Native expansive conception of persons, and the important difference between them.
As the story goes, Coyote and Iktome were going about in their usual
way when they came upon Iya—a quite old and powerful Rock—and Coyote
(quite uncharacteristically) gifted him his thick woolen blanket. In response
to Iktome’s surprise, Coyote replied: “It’s nothing. I’m always giving things
away. Iya looks real nice in my blanket.”
“His blanket, now,” Iktome reminded.
Well, the weather turned off wet and cold, and the pair took refuge in
a cave. Coyote, without his warm blanket, was freezing, so he sent Iktome
back to retrieve the blanket from Iya. The Rock rebuffed him saying, “No,
what is given is given!”
Coyote was beside himself when Iktome returned empty handed, so
he confronted Iya himself—and he took back the gifted blanket.
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An Expansive Conception of Persons
83
“So there; that’s the end of it,” Coyote said.
“By no means the end,” said the Rock.
Coyote returned to the cave with the blanket and found Iktome fixing a lunch of pemmican and fry-bread. The pair dined and then settled
down for a smoke to enjoy the fair weather that followed the storm when
they heard a rumble that shook the very ground. It was Iya, returning to
retrieve his blanket.
“Friend, let’s run for it!” cried Iktome. “Iya means to kill us!”
Iya chased Coyote and Iktome across the river and through the woods;
Iya’s power enabled him to swim the river as though he were made of
wood, and to splinter trees left and right in the forest. Iktome recognized
the peril and “excused” himself, turning into a spider and scampering down
a mouse hole.
Iya caught Coyote—and rolled right over him, squashing him flat.
After collecting his blanket, the Rock returned to his place, saying, “What
is given is given.” (Leading Cloud, in Erdoes and Ortiz 1984: 337–39).
Coyote is a Trickster in many Native traditions; his role is played by
Raven and Hare in others. One of Trickster’s many purposes in stories is
to show most graphically what is bound to happen when one forgets one’s
proper place, failing to be mindful of one’s relationships with and responsibilities to others, or giving into one’s own desires at the expense of others.
When Trickster acts on impulse, is greedy, vain, sometimes just mindlessly
self-absorbed—or when he reclaims a gifted blanket—then he disrupts a
delicate equilibrium between persons in a dynamic network of relationships
sustained by mutual respect, courtesy, and equality. This should be his lesson—and we should learn as well, for we all too often act in the same ways
(Martin 1999: 59–62). It often ends badly for Coyote; but like his contemporary animated relative, Wiley Coyote, he seems always to recover—and
never to learn from his missteps. Iktome, the Spider person, is usually the
butt of laughter—human, plant, and animal alike—because he always seeks
shortcuts; Deloria (1999) shares that his stories teach humility and “the
consequences of attempting to be what one is not supposed to be”1 (26).
The first misconception to dispel is that these and like powerful
nonhuman spirit persons are gods as understood in Western religious traditions.2 For, if they were such entities, then they would be quite different
from human beings in kind—they would be supernatural, infallible, and
omnipotent. But there is, first of all, no distinction between the natural
and the supernatural in the American Indian world version. According to
Hallowell (1960), one does not find this fundamental Western distinction
in the Native worldview because there is no analogue of the concept of the
natural world—understood as an inanimate material world governed by fixed
physical laws—in American Indian traditions. Using the example of the
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Ojibwa conception of gizis, the “day luminary,” Hallowell observes that the
sun is not a natural object in the Western sense; it is a nonhuman person.
So, he concludes, if the concept of the natural is absent, so must be the
concept of the supernatural. Considering powerful nonhuman spirit persons
to be “supernatural persons,” he says,
. . . is completely misleading, if for no other reason than the
fact that the concept of “supernatural” presupposes a concept of
the “natural.” The latter is not present in Ojibwa thought. It is
unfortunate that the natural–supernatural dichotomy has been
so persistently invoked by many anthropologists in describing
the outlook of peoples in cultures other than our own. (28)
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Deloria (1999) concurs in his reflections about how Western thinkers separate the material and the spiritual—that is, the natural and the supernatural—into two realms. “We are not dealing, therefore, with a conception of
nature in the same way that Western thinkers conceive of things” (357).
So, without a conception of the supernatural, it is obvious that powerful
nonhuman spirit persons in American Indian traditions cannot be supernatural gods.
Nor are they infallible; indeed, if the story about Coyote, Iktome and
Iya doesn’t make clear that these powerful spirit persons can make mistakes,
the Shawnee origin story does. As Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee Prophet, told
it to Trowbridge:
When the Great spirit made this Island he thought it necessary
to make also human beings to inhabit it, and with this view he
formed an Indian. After making him he caused him to stand
erect, and having surveyed him from head to foot he pronounced
the work defective, and made another, which he examined in
the same manner with great care and particularity and at length
pronounced him well made & perfect. (Kinietz and Voegelin 1;
all idiosyncrasies are faithful to the text)
But this second creation was still defective, for the Great Spirit had
placed the “privates” under the arm of the man and the woman. After
some reflection—and vexation—he rearranged the different members of the
body, “and at last made them as they now are, and was satisfied.” Unlike
infallible Western deities, the Great Spirit’s first two human creations were
mistakes; like humans, it took multiple tries—a little practice—to finally
get it right.
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An Expansive Conception of Persons
85
So, Coyote, Iktome, Iya and other powerful nonhuman spirit persons
are neither supernatural nor infallible; and although quite powerful, they
are not omnipotent. Recall that Tenskwatawa informs Trowbridge that white
men were made by another spirit over whom he had no control. In short,
then, these Indian powerful nonhuman spirit entities are not supernatural
godlike deities; they are, we will see, no different in kind than human beings,
although they differ in power.
Now, this account began with the universal American Indian belief
that entities like Coyote, Iktome, and Iya are nonhuman spirit persons in
order to consider how they are like and unlike human beings and human persons—for the two are not equivalent. Doing so will help us begin to understand both human beings and personhood in American Indian traditions.
First, to similarities: Coyote, Iktome, and Iya all have, to a greater or lesser
extent, some of the attributes of human beings qua animate beings. Coyote
and Iktome eat pemmican and fry-bread, smoke pipes, and shiver in the
cold, just like we do. Moreover, they have needs and desires, as well as the
rationality and volition to satisfy them. More importantly, Coyote, Iktome,
and Iya participate in a network of social and moral practices and relationships, just as human persons do. Coyote and Iktome are friends—although
the Spider Person will not stand with his friend when “the chips are down”;
Coyote has moral obligations to Iya—although he ignores those obligations
by taking back his gifted blanket. They speak and scheme together, and they
make mistakes in dealing with others—just as human persons do—and bear
the consequences of those missteps.
There are also obvious differences between these powerful nonhuman
spirit persons and human beings and human persons. The first and most
obvious difference is that, contrary to Poole’s Western philosophical notion,
Coyote, Iktome, and Iya are nonhuman persons, although they can assume
human form. And it is far less obvious from outward appearances that Iya
has any of the attributes of a human being—let alone a person—until, of
course, the rock acts on the moral impulse to retrieve his blanket—the
kind of impulse on which a person would act. And it is a moral impulse;
Iya’s motive is righting a wrong, not merely regaining the blanket he really
doesn’t need, for “What is given is given.” Second, Coyote, Iktome, and Iya
are extraordinarily powerful entities—indeed, apparently far more powerful
than human beings. Although a huge boulder, Iya is able to swim a river as
though he were made of wood and then smash a forest, “splintering the big
pines to pieces”; Iktome has the power to transform himself into a spider and
escape down a mouse hole; and Coyote—although smashed flat by Iya—has
the power to “make himself come to life again.” Great power, then, seems
to be an attribute of these nonhuman spirit persons.
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Because we adopted the American Indian belief that Coyote, Iktome,
and Iya are nonhuman spirit persons at the outset, it should be clear that
we will not agree with Poole that being human is a necessary condition
for personhood in Native traditions. However, in our development of an
American Indian expansive conception of persons we can embrace his
other fundamental insights that (1) personhood does not constitute the
essence of a human being; (2) an entity is a person by virtue of its membership and participation in a network of social and moral relationships
and practices with other persons; and (3) moral agency is at the core
of personhood. There are, then, two questions that need to be carefully
distinguished as we proceed. First, what is essential to being human qua
animate entity in the Native worldview? This is what human beings will
share with nonhuman spirit persons, because they are animate beings too.
Second, what do Indians believe is essential to personhood? Human persons
will share this with Coyote, Iktome, and Iya, because they are persons—as
well as animate beings.3
First, human beings qua animate beings are essentially spirit beings—
who just happen to have a changeable outward human form—and it is
this that human beings have in common with other animate beings. It
usually is at this juncture that the skeptical Western scientific and philosophical minds guffaw, then disengage, because the claim has nothing but
the air of the supernatural—which endangers, by the way, our constructivist
claim that the American Indian world version is nonempty. For, apparently one cannot perceive a spirit, so the predicate “spirit” is as empty
as other empty predicates—“angel,” “devil,” and “possible entity” among
them—in Goodman’s gallery of rogues. There is no counter to this argument;
however, it has force only if the American Indian linguistic category that is
translated as the Western term “spirit” is equally empty. In the Algonquinspeaking tribes (e.g., Shawnee, Lenni Lenape, Ojibwa, Pottawatomie, and
Ottawa), the word translated as “spirit” is “manitou.” I propose—perhaps
remarkably—that the experiential content of the Native concept manitou is
closely akin to the experiential content of the Western concept mind. And
if there are no constructivist qualms about minds, then manitouki should
not be rejected out of hand, simply because they seem to be supernatural
by Western lights.4
It is not surprising that the American Indian world version has an
unjustified reputation for introducing the supernatural into the account
of animate beings, for that is the overwhelmingly accepted scholarly and
popular interpretation. Notice, for example, how James Howard’s (1981)
otherwise admirable anthropological treatment of past and present Shawnee
culture and ceremony describes a vision quest:
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An Expansive Conception of Persons
87
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At the age of puberty or slightly before (about twelve or thirteen
years of age), Shawnee boys were sent out into the woods to
fast and seek a spirit helper. This spirit helper was a supernatural
creature who usually appeared to the supplicant in the form of
an animal or a bird after the individual had fasted and prayed
for a sufficient period. (136; emphasis added)
However, we have seen that there is no distinction between the natural and
the supernatural in Native traditions; that a manitou should come during
such a ritual is no doubt a very profound experience—but it is at the same
time utterly commonplace. Howard’s rather matter-of-fact assumption that
a spirit helper is supernatural is wholly the contribution of the standard
anthropological interpretation of the ritual, as it tends to be in general when
Western interpreters impose their conceptual categories on the American
Indian world version.
I have mental experiences, so the predicate “mind” is not empty.
Although I do not have direct access to the beliefs and desires, private
internal conversations, and secret unspoken aspirations of other human
beings—although I cannot directly experience the minds of others—I know
other human beings have minds.5 I rehearse the familiar argument if one is
required: I exhibit outward behaviors in conjunction with and sometimes
caused by my mental events. I grimace when in pain, blush with the occasional lie, and smile when I think of Linda. But I see others exhibiting the
same sorts of outward behaviors; others grimace, blush, and smile—they also
sing and drum, make love, and wage war. I infer, then, from their outward
signs that other human beings have pains, sometimes play fast-and-loose
with the truth, and think fondly of their mates just as I do when I behave
in similar ways; I infer from the outward sign that other human beings have
minds like I do. I know that you have sentience and volition, desires and
beliefs, memories and self-reflection, and the same kind of rich inner mental
life that I have.
So, there is pretty good empirical evidence—although not the conclusive evidence demanded by the curmudgeon in the philosophy department—that other human beings have minds. However, if philosophers were
honest, they would admit that no argument is really necessary, for the fact
that others have minds is as deeply ingrained in our world version as the
fact that there were three red cardinals around my feeder last spring. Indeed,
the idea that other human beings could be mindless strikes us as bizarre as
the notions that “the three cardinals redded” or “there was red cardinal at
the feeder.” Minds are both a part of our constructed world—and what are
required to construct that world.
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Now, the traditional Algonquin speaker experiences her own animation—her own life force, if you will—so “manitou,” like “mind,” is not empty.
As an animate being, she eats pemmican and sometimes smokes, shivers in
the cold and sweats in the heat, and has a living body now that will probably die. She directly experiences other human beings eating and smoking,
living and dying, and she infers from their outward signs that they, too, are
animate and have a conscious mental life replete with beliefs and desires.
So she knows that other human beings have manitouki as well. But human
beings are not alone in eating and shivering, living and dying; nor are they
alone in exhibiting the kinds of behaviors indicative of animation. Other
things in the world—animal, plant and place, physical force, and cardinal
direction—are experienced to be or to act as animate beings; they have manitouki, too. And exactly like the deeply ingrained Western conviction that
other human beings have minds, the notion that such things do not have
manitouki would strike our traditional Algonquin speaker as bizarre—manitouki are a part of the American Indian constructed world.
J. Baird Callicott (1989) echoes and embraces our argument from his
own Western philosophical perspective:
The Indian attitude . . . apparently was based upon the consideration that since human beings have a physical body and an
associated consciousness (conceptually hypostatized or reified as
“spirit”), all other bodily things, animals, plants, and, yes, even
stones, were also similar in this respect. Indeed, this strikes me
as an eminently reasonable assumption. I can no more directly
perceive another human being’s consciousness than I can that
of an animal or plant. I assume that another human being is
conscious since he or she is perceptibly very like me (in other
respects) and I am conscious. To anyone not hopelessly prejudiced . . . human beings closely resemble in anatomy, physiology,
and behavior other forms of life. . . . Virtually all things might
be supposed, without the least strain upon credence, like ourselves, to be “alive,” that is, conscious, aware, or possessed of
spirit. (185–86)
Although we agree “in spirit” with Callicott’s defense of the “eminently reasonable assumption” that virtually all things might be supposed
to be conscious as we are, he frankly overstates the case. Although the
category manitou is fundamental in the Native world version, it is not true
that everything in the grammatical animate class is alive. When Hallowell
asks an Ojibwa informant whether all stones, which are in the animate class,
are living, he replies “No! But some are.” Hallowell (1960) explains that the
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An Expansive Conception of Persons
89
Ojibwa no more believe that all stones are animate than we do, but that
their conception of the structure of the world, as well as their confidence
in direct experience, force them to leave open the possibility that animate
stones will be encountered in the future:
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Whereas we should never expect a stone to manifest animate
properties of any kind under any circumstances, the Ojibwa recognize, a priori, potentialities for animation in certain classes of
objects under certain circumstances. The Ojibwa do not perceive
stones, in general, as animate, any more than we do. The crucial
test is experience. Is there any personal testimony available? In
answer to this question we can say that it is asserted by informants that stones have been seen to move, that some stones
manifest other animate properties. (25)
Deloria (1999) concurs, observing that “it is not an article of faith in any
Indian religion that everything has spirit,” that is, that everything is animate
(224). Even so, we see in the Ojibwa informant’s cautious response both the
kind of reliance on direct experience for verification and the belief about a
world that unfixed and unfinished that we have earlier discussed.
Now, it is a commonplace in Native stories and, indeed, in everyday experience, that animate beings have an outward form that can change.
Iktome, the Spider Person, transformed into a spider and escaped from Iya by
scampering down a mouse hole. Calvin Martin (1999) tells the story about
an Inupiaq called Katauq, whose spirit went traveling to a great meeting
of bowhead whales to learn their habits and ways. Black Elk (2000), as
well, conveys a traveling experience when, while touring with Buffalo Bill’s
show in England, his spirit traveled to Pine Ridge and saw his parents. And
everyone has had a dream experience where a friend from afar, or perhaps a
loved one who has passed, visits. Although Hallowell mistakenly identifies
such metamorphoses as attributes of persons—and not of animate beings
as we do—he correctly emphasizes “that the capacity for metamorphosis is
one of the features which links human beings with the other-than-human
[beings] in their behavioral environment . . . Human beings do not differ
from them in kind, but in power” (39). Although human beings have the
capacity to transform, they may not have the power to do so without the
help of other powerful spirit beings.
In the American Indian worldview, then, personhood does not constitute the essence of a human being qua animate being, just as Poole correctly concludes in his analysis of the Western conception of personhood.
In general, animate beings are conceived of as they are by the traditional
Ojibwa, as having “an inner vital part that is enduring and an outward form
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The Dance of Person and Place
which can change. Vital . . . attributes such as sentience, volition, memory,
speech are not dependent upon outward appearance but upon the inner vital
essence of being” (Hallowell 1960: 42). However, in American Indian traditions an animate being is a person by virtue of its membership and participation in an actual network of social and moral relationships and practices
with other persons, so moral agency is at the core of a Native conception
of persons, just as Poole finds in his analysis of the Western conception of
personhood. This means that one cannot be a person in isolation in Native
traditions, even with something like Lockean self-reflection or Kantian rationality. However a significant difference from Poole’s Western conception
is that membership in the network of social and moral relationships goes
well beyond the merely human to include many other sorts of nonhuman
persons—some very powerful—like Coyote, Iktome, and Iya. Moreover, the
relationships one finds in the American Indian community of human and
nonhuman persons are closer in nature to kinship relationships (i.e., familial
ties), than to the sorts of contractual relationships and obligations between
persons one finds in Western accounts of civil society.
Hallowell observes that human and the nonhuman spirit persons
participate in the same sorts of familial relationships and practices in his
study of the Ojibwa. The Ojibwa share in the widespread American Indian
practice of using the kinship term “grandfather” to refer to persons, both
human and nonhuman—without any discernable distinction drawn between
them—because human and nonhuman grandfathers stand in similar relationships with their human kin. For example, nonhuman persons share their
power with human beings by bestowing blessings on them, just as a human
grandfather bestows blessings of power through the naming ceremony, in
which the elder dreams a child’s name. “In other words,” says Hallowell
(1960), “the relation between a human child and a human grandfather
is functionally patterned in the same way as the relation between human
beings and grandfathers of an other-than-human class” (22).
So, the Grandfathers (and sometimes Grandmothers, for the Shawnee
creator Kokumena is Our Grandmother) are powerful nonhuman spirit persons whose intimate familial relationships with human persons are evidenced
by the use of the kinship term “grandfather.” However, a similar use of other
kinship terms indicates that there are other kinds of persons in the nexus of
social and moral relationships in the Native world version—in the Native
familial social group—besides human persons and the Grandfathers. At the
very beginning of Black Elk’s (2000) narrative, he shares that his story is “of
all life that is holy and is good to tell, and of us two-leggeds sharing in it
with the four-leggeds and the wings of the air and all green things; for these
are children of one mother and their father is one spirit” (1). Black Elk’s
conception of nonhuman animals and plants—the “four-leggeds,” “wings of
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An Expansive Conception of Persons
91
the air,” and “all green things”—as siblings mirrors similar relationships in
human families, reinforcing the notion that these other sorts of nonhuman
beings also stand in the kinship relationships that constitute personhood. In
the human sphere, of course, persons have very special responsibilities arising from their familial connections to parents and siblings—responsibilities
that go well beyond the minimal contractual obligations extant in Western
civil society. The use of familial kinship terms in conceiving of human
relationships with nonhuman animals and plants reinforces the notion that
human beings have similar sorts of responsibilities to them as well—to honor
and respect the Great Spirit and Mother Earth, and especially their children,
as they honor and respect their human family members.6
So, human persons participate in a familial social group with other
human persons, with powerful spirit persons—Our Grandmother, the Thunderbirds, and Cyclone Person among them—and also with their plant and
animal siblings; and it is participation in this actual, concrete nexus of
moral relationships and obligations that constitutes their personhood. But
other nonhuman entities are members of the Native social group, including
the manitouki of the ancestors sometimes experienced in dreams. As well,
particular places can have manitouki, when “people live so intimately with
environment that they are in relationship to the spirits that live [there].
This is not an article of faith; it is a part of human experience. I think that
non-Indians sometimes experience this also when they are in natural environments” (Deloria 1999: 224). Indeed, I have experienced such a presence
while visiting the Petroglyph National Monument in New Mexico.
The real meaning of transformation, Calvin Martin suggests, is the
kinship of the apparently different sorts of persons in the American Indian
familial social group. Animate beings are spirit beings, all of whom have
the capacity—if not the power—to change their outward forms. Iktome
can transform from human to spider form; Kopit, Old Beaver Person, transforms from human to beaver form; the Three Sisters bring corn, beans, and
squash to the Seneca—an then become corn, beans, and squash; White
Buffalo Woman transforms into a buffalo after bringing the sacred pipe to
the Lakota. The profound lesson is that all animate beings are essentially
the same kind of entity—a manitou with a changeable outward form—so
they are all related.
We are not making a silly claim that what Westerners understand as
the natural world is viewed by Indians as “one big family.” Kinship groups are
fairly small, and relationships within them are close, concrete and directly
experienced. Although I might have a contractual sort of obligation not to
violate the property rights of every person in a Western civil society, I don’t
care for every person as I do about kin; the relationships in a civil society
are too minimal and too abstract.
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The Dance of Person and Place
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Figure 5.1. The American Indian kinship group
The American Indian kinship group (Figure 5.1), then, has human
and nonhuman members of various outward forms, standing in social and
moral relationships with other persons, and it is by virtue of these actual,
concrete relationships that animate beings are persons. I was taught that
respect for others grounds these relationships and is the principle moral attitude in the Shawnee tradition; I was taught to “respect every living thing
as a person.” And Viola Cordova (2004) emphasizes a second important
Indian value that undergirds the relationships between persons in the Native
familial community—equality:
The Native American recognizes his dependence on the Earth
and the Universe. He recognizes no hierarchy of “higher” or
“lower” or “simple” or “complex,” and certainly not of “primitive” and “modern.” Instead of hierarchies he sees differences
which exist among equal “beings” (mountains, as well as water
and air and plants and animals would be included here). The
equality is based on the notion, often unstated, that everything
that is, is of one process. (177)
That is, all persons in the nexus of relationships have equal value and
are due respect by virtue of playing creative roles in the same dynamic pro-
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An Expansive Conception of Persons
93
cess—making and sustaining the American Indian world. We see in the next
chapter how gifting, the most important normative Native practice, serves
to sustain this network of relationships, but Black Elk provides a glimpse.
After he and his father kill two deer, Black Elk (2000) felt the moral pangs
of having been gifted the deer, but then not being appropriately grateful for
the gift or sharing it with other flesh eating nonhuman persons:
“Father, should we not offer one of these to the wild things?”
He looked hard at me again for a while. Then he placed one
of the deer with its head to the east, and, facing the west, he
raised his hand and cried, “Hey-hey” four times and prayed like
this: “Grandfather, the Great Spirit, behold me! To all the wild
things that eat flesh, this I have offered that my people may live
and the children grow up with plenty.” (64–65)
Notably, sharing the gift of the deer with “all the wild things that eat
flesh”—gifting to them—helps to ensure that the Lakota will have plenty—unsurprising, because “we are all related.”7 And it should not escape our
attention that Coyote’s error in our story was violating this most fundamental of
Native moral practices!
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An American Indian Expansive Conception of Persons
We began with Poole’s insightful critique of a prominent Western conception of persons, finding that in our development of an American Indian
conception we could agree that personhood is not what is essential to being
human. Human beings are, instead, “spirit beings”—manitouki—who just
happen to have a human form. We agreed as well that human beings become
persons—and sustain their identity as persons—by virtue of their participation social and moral relationships with other persons. In the Native worldview, the relationships and obligations that engender and sustain persons are
familial in nature and are based on respect and equality, so they are moral
relationships. Thus, moral agency is at the core of the Indian conception
of personhood.
Unlike Poole’s analysis of the Western notion of persons, however, we
saw that the Native conception is expansive, for all sorts of nonhuman spirit
beings—ancestors and animals, plants and places, physical forces and cardinal directions, the Sun, Earth, and other powerful manitouki—are members
of the American Indian kinship group, and so are persons.
Although there are nonhuman animal and plant persons in Native traditions, not all animate beings are persons, for the standards for personhood
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The Dance of Person and Place
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are pretty high—one must participate in a social nexus more akin to a
family than a civil society. More generally, not everything that is in the
grammatically animate class of things is a person, although it is fair to say
that being animate is a necessary condition for personhood. But for that
matter, not all human beings are persons on most Western accounts. Indeed,
I would argue that not all human beings are persons on the American Indian
account as well. I imagine that cultural anthropologists Hallowell observing
the Ojibwa and Howard the Shawnee never became a part of the familial
Native groups they were studying; that would have negatively influenced
the kind of objectivity required for a proper scientific investigation. I doubt
that they performed the requisite ceremonies and participated in the life of
the tribe in the way that would make them real persons.
I close with a story recounted by Lee Hester of the visit of John Proctor—the oldest living Creek medicine man—to a class Hester was teaching
entitled “Native American Identity.” In response to a student’s question,
“What makes you Creek?,” Mr. Proctor replied, “If you come to the stomp
ground for four years, take the medicines and dance the dances, then you are
Creek” (Cheney and Hester 2001: 327). This seemingly simple and straightforward response masks a quite profound notion: Becoming Creek—becoming a real person—requires taking the medicines and dancing the dances;
one must perform the ceremonies, assume the tribal roles and participate
in the Creek life and familial social group to be a person.
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