How Should We Understand Indigenous Spirituality (in English)? A reflection on the philosophy of listening

Indigenous spirituality matters to Indigenous peoples. In this discussion, I am broadly interested in how Indigenous spirituality is used in contemporary Indigenous politics. More specifically, I ask the question: How should we understand Indigenous spirituality in English? My discussion involves three interrelated claims (the first is political, the second is philosophical, the third is reflective):

1 – The Canadian common law, and Indigenous policymaking in general in Canada, fails to listen to Indigenous peoples in and on their own terms. In the process of saying what it means to listen to Indigenous peoples in and on their own terms, I will show, by way of two contemporary examples – Wet’suwet’en politics in British Columbia and the 1492 Land Back Lane land defenders on Six Nations Reserve in Ontario – that Indigenous spirituality/philosophy continues to be marginalized, distorted, and ignored in the legal and political relationship.

2 – I suggest that Wittgenstein’s views on language, meaning and philosophy can help us understand Indigenous spiritualityin ways that in the very least necessitates Indigenous voices speak in and on their own terms in the ongoing legal and political relationship.

3 – In the third part, I reflect on what it means for Indigenous peoples to be listened to in and on their own terms. In my paper I devote a lot of space to discussing Wittgenstein, but for my presentation I will raise two practical ways of how we can listen to Indigenous peoples in and on their own terms. (It is by discussing examples that we can see the applicability of Wittgenstein’s philosophical thought.)

Ceremonial Morality: What a History of Oath-Taking Reveals about Practices of Living in a Good Way

A dominant strand of Christian theology has defined morality as biblically-rooted in Mosaic law, distinguishing it from “ceremonial” and “civic or judicial” laws also found in the Hebrew Bible. This theological view has had significant effects on definitions and policing of religion and ceremony in British colonial jurisdictions including North America and India. In this paper, I conjoin the ceremonial and the moral with a specific focus on the lasting practice of oath-making in colonial secular jurisdictions. Informed by the work of scholars of religion and law such as Robert Yelle and scholars of law and Indigenous studies such as John Borrows, I consider oaths of citizenship and oaths of office as sites at which “secular” politics and “religious” commitments commingle in the performance of ceremonial morality.

Between Gratitude and Guilt: The Promise of a Better Life in a Settler Colony

Relying on auto ethnography, international law, refugee law and settler colonial studies, this paper aims to trouble the promises of refuge, as encapsulated within the various domestic and international protection regimes. Using my own lived experience as a survivor of a civil war and as a refugee that came to Canada hoping for safety, in this paper I will juxtapose the promises of the refugee system and the erasure of the original peoples of Turtle Island. By doing so, I seek to situate the grateful refugee in Canada within a settler colonial context. By locating this paper between gratitude and guilt, I will argue that the symbolic aspirations and promises embedded in the refugee convention and its domestic incorporation into the Canadian settler colonial legal framework traps refugees between guilt and gratitude. The promise of safety is contingent and eventually promotes erasure. It is contingent on the refugee being grateful to the settler colonial state for awarding the necessary protection while simultaneously forcing the erasure of the original and First Peoples of this land that is now known as Canada. The erasure is predicated on for example the lack of awareness amongst refugees of the history of settlement and colonization. The guilt is, for some, based on the erasure of Indigenous peoples through land dispossession, lack of services and by other means.

The paper will be unfolded in three section. First, I will set out the promises encapsulated within the international and domestic refugee protection regime as a means to afford protection to those fleeing persecution “by reason of a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion” (Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, S.C. 2001, c. 27, s.96). Then I will chronicle my own experiences of fleeing the then war torn state of Sri Lanka and arriving in Canada seeking asylum. In this section, I will explore how refugees are selected and are expected to perform, based on the exclusionary clauses of the Refugee Convention and the inadmissibility requirements of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. The promise of safety is again contingent on what Carbado and Gulati have coined as “acting white” (Carbado and Gulati 2013). This performance in a number of ways requires an allegiance to the Canadian sovereign and a deep sense of gratitude. In the final section, I will then turn to my own journey of ‘uncovering’ the place and space of the First peoples of this land that I now call ‘home’. It is an account of how I became aware of my own complicity in the ongoing genocide of Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island and how I have started to reconcile and contend with my own guilt and my gratitude.

The Swearer’s Prayer

At precisely the time elite Americans abandoned or modified Christian theologies of perdition, American procedural law came to rely ever more strongly on the traditional link between law and the theology of divine punishment: the testimonial oath. While conventional histories of American evidence law tell a rather straightforward modernization story of a move from premodern sacral modes of prooftaking to rational forensic modes of examination, this paper shows that oathtaking did not diminish under modern law reform but significantly expanded with the influence of New York’s code of 1848. For the first time in America, the New York code required all pleadings to be sworn by the parties, and all parties and interested witnesses were made competent to take the oath and testify on the stand. Lawyers at first expected the dread of cross examination to deter perjury, but they quickly adjusted their theories in practice to detect lying under oath, which they believed had become rampant under the code. The lawyers’ faith in their ability to detect truth were stymied, however, as racialized witnesses came before the bar. In order to account for racial disqualifications on testimony in a world increasingly open to party testimony (and perjury), lawyers revived an older theology of perdition, swirling together supposedly premodern and rational modes of investigation well into the twentieth century.