Indigenous ways of worlding as systemic understanding of human and more-than-human influence in generating worlds in becoming

Abstract

In this paper I explore the participatory onto-epistemology – ways of knowing linked to ways of worlding – expressed by Indigenous sages and scholars in numerous parts of the globe. (The term Indigenous here signals groupings of people who have been subjected to Euro-American colonization.) I point to, and draw out, their systemic approach grounded in the understanding that “things” (including our “selves”) always exist in relation. This ontology – sometimes called a political ontology – implies an axiological commitment to strive to heal relations that have become unbalanced among and between human and more-than-human agents (animals, plants, rivers, etc. whose agency and intelligence too must be respected). It suggests that we need to be alert to how our thinking processes, as part of a community of human and more than-human agents, willy nilly contributes to having influence on/in a world-in-becoming. Otherwise expressed, in terms of this onto-epistemology we are enmeshed in a web of relations in which we shape worlds as we enact our thinking-and-being with others with whom/which we are engaged. This (co)responsibility for world-forming cannot be avoided. I note that an Indigenous systemic outlook has not been highlighted in mainstream accounts of the history of systems thinking and that the superwicked crises such as appropriation of Indigenous lands to make way for the operation of global (extractive) capital, destruction of Indigenous communities along the way, superexploitation of racialized labor across the globe, superexploitation of “cheap nature”, mass extinction of species due to an anthropocentric outlook, etc., have not been given due attention in the mainstream systems literature.