Winter 2022 Colloquium – Dale Turner

• In-person event

• Contact
• Lauren Wells-McGregor, lauren.wellsmcgregor@carleton.ca

Please join us for our upcoming Philosophy colloquium, taking place on Friday, March 25 at 1:00 P.M. (Ottawa time). The Zoom details will be circulated the week of the talk; please register here.

Dale Turner
Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Toronto
Friday, March 25, 2022
1:00 P.M. EST

“Words are Deeds”: Indigenous Spirituality and Visions of Reconciliation

Indigenous traditionalists claim that their relationships to their homelands are spiritual in nature. In this reflective talk, I explore what Indigenous peoples mean when they make this claim in the context of the contemporary legal and political relationship with the Canadian state. My talk is divided into three parts.

I begin by discussing two examples (with a side glance to a few others) of when Indigenous peoples in Canada have invoked their spirituality in the contemporary legal and political relationship: the Wet’suwet’en and Gitxsan uses of the kungax and aadawk in the Delgamuukw case and the Anishinaabek Nation of Ontario’s use of Anishinaabe teachings in their recently ratified constitution, the Chi Naaknigewin. In the second part, I adopt a Wittgensteinian approach to language, meaning, and the nature of philosophical inquiry itself to argue that a pragmatic approach to language and meaning recognizes Indigenous spirituality as a legitimate philosophical system of thought in the legal and political relationship between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state. I end my discussion with a few thoughts on the relationship between Indigenous spirituality and reconciliation in Canada.