Thanks to the hard work and organizing efforts of Anne Waters and other philosophers, there is an effort to transform philosophy and the American Philosophical Association to be more inclusive of indigenous philosophies. The goals of the newly formed American Indian Philosophy Association are to bring about a greater understanding and appreciation of Native American philosophies and to encourage the entry of more Native Americans into the profession. This session on Native Women Philosophers serves as a reminder that despite the strides women have made in philosophy over the past two decades, much work remains to insure that the diversity of women’s voices are represented at philosophy conferences and in our classrooms.

Dr. Viola Cordova ("The Trouble with Women") began the session with a reflection on her experiences with a white student to describe how white women and their concerns appear from the standpoint of a native woman. She reminded her audience that "woman" is a general term that can hide complex differences between women.

One day after class had ended a student confronted her with the question: "You don’t like women much do you?" Cordova’s response was "what do you mean by "women"? To which the student replied "you don’t much like American women," meaning white women.

Cordova spoke of her experiences with white women. As a child she found that the white girls often manipulated her and her cousins into doing things for them. She came from a family that rewarded cooperation; the white girls were competitive. And they gossiped. In answer to the student’s question, Cordova states: "Why can’t I relate to white women? Different value systems, I offer, different socialization. She doesn’t understand. Women, in general, in her view, are downtrodden, suppressed, and powerless. Men are dominant, aggressive, controlling. Who is she, I wonder, to define all females of the species by the portrait her own culture offers her? No one has said to me that I am inferior because I am female. Humans consist of both males and females for a reason. We each have a part to play. I, as a female, am responsible for the survival of the group. The male is responsible for the survival of the culture. I decide who lives or dies; the male decides the rules by which we live or die."

Cordova spoke of the complexly different value and life situations between native women and white women. In native cultures, Cordova explained, there is (or was before colonization) equality between women and men. Women bear the race. Men bear the culture. Neither can exist without the other. There is no superior or inferior.

White women, Cordova explained, reminded her of teenage Indian males. Teenage Indian males are the most beautiful of creatures. They are cocky, aware of their own strength and beauty. The Indian female wants to portray a character of stability. She is independent, trustworthy, and honest. Cordova explains that it is "natural" for young males to preen. In white society it is the women who preen. But, Cordova insists, the difference is that Indian males grow up. Not so white women. The trouble with white women, Cordova asserts, is that they don’t ever become persons.

To be a person, Cordova argues, one must get out of one’s own subjectivity and learn to see broader injustices. The white student was only concerned with what Cordova thought of her. "You don’t like women much do you?" ("You don’t like me.") She was unable to think about the situation of native women, their experiences, and their culture. We must learn to understand different situations, to see the differences and the injustices, to go beyond what someone thinks of you or what injustices have entered into your life. We must learn to become persons.

White women, Cordova asserted to an audience of primarily white women, have more to learn from her than she has to learn from them. She went into philosophy to answer the question "Who is this man who owns my world?" Both through her studies and through her life experiences, she knows a lot about "this man" and about "that woman." But what do white women know about native women?

To the question of how white women are to learn from native women, Cordova talked about the importance of learning by "seeing." When her parents saw that she had artistic ability, she was sent to live with an artist. Like Marķa Lugones’ notion of world traveling, Cordova tells us that white women will learn from Native women only if they make the effort, not if they, like the little white girls of her childhood, expect Indian women to do the work for them.

Mariella Bacigalupo ("Mapuche Women Healers and the Contributions to Feminist Theory and Discourse") spoke of her anthropological work in Southern Chile with Mapuche women healers. She used her experiences to object to typical practice by academics to group large numbers of different peoples under categories like "healer" or "Third world" such that the diversity of their experiences are lost. As an anthropologist she critiqued the practice of anthropologist as "authority," in which even when an anthropologist "allows" subjects to "speak for themselves" the native person is seen as a collaborator rather than an authority or a scholar.

Like Cordova, Bacigalupo critiqued the practice within feminism of judging other women by the white feminist yardstick, and deplored the common practice both within feminism and the academy at large to depict native people as homogeneous, exotic, and other. She argued that underlying depictions of native cultures as homogeneous is the desire to control them either materially or intellectually.

Bacigalupo discussed her experiences with Panche, the Mapuche women healer with whom she lived and studied. These experiences provided a lens for a new understanding of constructions of self and other that recognize that identity is complex, emerging, and is formed in multiple settings.

Panche presented herself as a traditional wise woman in certain contexts and as mixed blood when in other contexts. In other words, Panche learned to create herself as either an insider or as an outsider depending on which construction would be most effective in the particular context. Symbols from outside of Mapuche communities were often incorporated into healing practices to gain power from them. For example, the cross or the symbol of the Virgin Mary were often adopted and resignified.

But when Bacigalupo began to write up her experiences with Panche, other anthropologists criticized Panche’s activities as "inauthentic" once again imposing an expectation of a homogeneous, exotic other. For the Mapuche, Bacigalupo explained, authenticity is the ability to heal. It was US anthropologists who insisted on authenticity of practice by positing a "pure" native practice.

Bacigalupo presented Panche as an illustration of the ways in which the self is constructed. We have the active self-construction of Panche, responding to the community and context in which she heals, a self that emerges in response to the various locations of which she is a part. And we have the imposition of a homogeneous "pure" conception of the native other by those who study their lives. Bacigalupo makes clear the errors caused by expectations of purity and homogeneity, as well as the failure to see the many native actions as forms of resistance rather than loss of authenticity.

Bacigalupo ended by arguing that the term "post-colonial" is not relevant to Latin American experiences because discourses of resistance, like those of Panche, have a long history in Latin American cultures, while colonization, particularly colonization due to class, is very much a present power struggle.

Jonella Andrea Clara Seymour’s presentation "Philosophy and Gender in Native Americans" discussed the imposition of the European conception of two genders on Native peoples and of the traditions that were lost due to such colonization.

Seymour discussed the Native experience of "Two Spirit" the individual who was both male and female. Gender, Seymour explained, was a cultural, social, and spiritual conception. The European link between sex and gender, with its attendant expectation that women would engage in female roles and practices and men would engage in male roles and practices, did not allow for the complex practices of two spirit individuals. Indeed, some communities had up to five genders. As missionaries and others imposed the European conception of two genders onto Native peoples, the rich traditions of the two spirit were lost to many communities.

Particularly problematic was the European conception of a biological or psychological link between biological sex and gender. The native practice allowed for individuals whose social roles blended the practices of males and females, or individuals who were women (or were men) who adopted the roles and practices of males (of females). The two spirit individual was perceived within their communities as privileged in that their spiritual mix of both the female and the male provided them an enriched perspective in which they could see different points of view from different perspectives.

Anne Waters closed the session with a summary of the presentations. Waters argued that Native women’s training in Western philosophy and their knowledge of native perspectives provides a perspective for rethinking assumed categories. Cordova, she argued, broke open the concept of woman to reveal its complexity. Bacigalupo provided an alternative conception of identity that demonstrates its fluidity, and Seymour brought us full circle in a way that begins to allow for the reconstruction of gender. Waters closed the session by emphasizing that Native American Womanists understand gender in ways very different than those of European feminists.