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Cheney discusses the relationship between truth, knowledge, and the wild world. He sketches two fundamentally different understandings of the relevance of natural environments to the production of knowledge. He further suggests that indigenous knowledge is based on an epistemology of respect woven within ceremonial worlds designed to accommodate human culture within a wild world.

One ought not to put too much stock in the word 'philosophy'. ... [T]here are alternative ways of intelligently engaging the world. To construe one's thinking in terms of belief is characteristic of a particular kind of world view and it remains to be seen whether those who share an indigenous world view conceive of experience in such an overtly intellectualized manner.

Leroy N. Meyer and Tony Ramirez (1996, 104)1

Wilderness treats me like a human being.

Tom Birch2

As Holmes Rolston III has said, "A principal characteristic of human life is that it develops into biography. In that sense, humans do not want their values in nature, any more than they want other goods in life, to come seriatim, like beads on a string.... Humans want a storied residence in nature where the passage of time integrates past, present, and future in a meaningful career" (Rolston 1988, 351). This is what I had hoped for: a narrative of storied residence in Midwest prairie, lake, and river country, and in the mountains and deserts of Idaho, with the history of the development of an environmental ethic (or ethos) left largely implicit within that larger narrative, leaving readers to reflect as they may on the philosophical dimensions of the journey. To leave traditional philosophical modes of expression completely behind proved impossible (for now), but it has been for me a worthwhile exercise to locate my reflections on "truth, knowledge, and the wild world" in something of a narrative form. It is the lakes and rivers, prairies, mountains, and deserts that have remained implicit. They have cast their spell, however, on any attempt to impose cultural order on the relationship between truth, knowledge, and the wild world.

I

Looking back on it, it seems that my entire philosophical career has been implicated-in one way or another, directly and indirectly-in these two questions: "How important is truth to knowledge and epistemology?" and "What is the role of natural environments in the production of knowledge?" Furthest back, at the very origin of my philosophical life, reflections on philosophical knowledge were inevitably posed and thought about in natural environments, particularly in my meditations as I drifted in the early morning mist on the St. Croix River and several Minnesota lakes, especially Cedar Lake. Even now, when I am trying to make my way to a new understanding of some philosophical issue, I walk along the shores of Lake Michigan and the Milwaukee River, or sit by rivers and lakes in Idaho, a place that became my second home after meeting my partner, Fran. Northern White Cedars stand in our yard, front and back; Western Red Cedar holds our house in its embrace.

There is no question in my mind that natural environments are the deepest sources of whatever philosophical understandings I may have come to. In terms of formal studies, however, the question of the role of natural environments in the production of knowledge did not emerge for me until, well into my teaching career, I discovered the newly-emerging field of environmental ethics. It was at that point that the deepest wellspring of my philosophy and my life came together with my professional philosophical interests-in an uneasy balance. Until that time, as I think of it now, my philosophical track through the curious environment of the academy, however well it prepared me to think about central issues in environmental ethics, was mostly marked by a fascination with glittering baubles and gemstones and did not truly touch the soil, water, and atmosphere of my life.

Questions of truth, knowledge, and epistemology took center stage from the beginning of my formal philosophical studies. As an undergraduate at Berkeley, Thompson Clarke introduced me (in three courses) to the skeptical implications of Ordinary Language Philosophy that had escaped the attention of J. L. Austin and others. This baptism into the rigors of skeptical philosophy left me pretty much convinced, as my partner and I packed our bags and headed for the University of Wisconsin-Madison for graduate school, that the quest for truth about the world was a nonstarter. Convinced-for a time, until other riches of the philosophical life revealed themselves-that the study of philosophy could be no more than a study of the history of ideas, getting acquainted with grand ideas and world views, I resolved to begin with the great religions of the Orient-Hinduism and Buddhism in particular-studying them through the heart and mind of the great Madhyamika scholar, Richard Robinson, then teaching in the East Asian Studies department in Madison. These studies were cut short by Robinson's untimely death, but not before I had encountered the remarkable analyses of the Buddhist dialectician Nagarjuna, who had argued with much force that all statements (his own included) lacked svabhava ("self-existent reality"-in this case, loosely translated, "truth") (Streng 1967), and Edward Conze's observation (Conze 1959,1967) that the metaphysical statements of Buddhism-e.g., anatman (no self) and pratityasamutpada ("dependent co-origination")-were not to be understood as expressing true beliefs about the world, but rather were to be taken as edifying views, views which, if accepted within the context of Buddhist practice, would be conducive to achieving liberation from the wheel of birth and death.3 At the same time, I introduced myself to Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (with its notion of "forms of life" and its linking of meaning and use) and Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolution (which delinked the concepts of "truth" and "scientific progress"). These early encounters, East and West, certainly served to convince me to set aside any simple answers to questions of the relationship between truth, knowledge, and epistemology. Later, at the beginning of my teaching career, these thoughts concerning truth, knowledge, and epistemology were pulled together for me as I listened with a sense of liberation to Nelson Goodman argue that "defeat and confusion are built into the notions of truth and certainty and knowledge." Rather than attempt to pry these concepts away from their historic Western uses, Goodman shifted his focus from truth to rightness, from certainty to adoption, and from knowledge to understanding.4

Only very much later did I begin to follow a different path leading off from J. L. Austin's work as I began to comprehend-while canoeing on Lottit Lake, nestled in the deep embrace of three billion year-old Canadian Shield granite in northwestern Ontario-the force of Austin's emphasis on performative uses of language. I had long since found my way to the newly-emerging field of environmental ethics and a philosophical understanding of my childhood intuitions concerning the connection between land and knowledge. Luck5 introduced me, during this time on the Canadian Shield (1996-97), to some of the very-much-alive Indian philosophy of Native North America, an introduction that-through acquaintance with day-to-day practices and oral teachings at many long lunches-confirmed me in some of my philosophical headings and subtly and powerfully changed such understanding of American Indians as I had picked up through the written word. This confluence of a performative understanding of language and acquaintance with a living Indian philosophy braided together, for me, questions of truth, knowledge, and epistemology with questions of the role of natural environments in the genesis of knowledge.

Though the philosophical journey I recount in the following sections both begins, and continues to concern itself throughout, with ethics, the reader will note that the two kinds of epistemological questions I have cited as central to my philosophical life are at the heart of the ethical concerns I now explore. Indeed, some link between epistemology and value theory (as well as narrative) is inevitable, given the now commonplace understanding that so-called facts are theory laden, theory is value laden, and values, as Donna Haraway has put it, are "story laden" (Haraway 1984).

II

During the time I was bringing my first paper in environmental philosophy to a close, I took a bus to Bowling Green, Ohio, to listen to Holmes Rolston III deliver a remarkable paper subtitled "Storied Fitness in the Moral Observer."6 Following Carol Gilligan's understanding that in an ethic of care that tends closely to the nurturing of what I call "defining relations" between people-a defining relationship is a relationship with something or someone that is at least partly definitive of one's understanding of who one is-the resolution of a moral dilemma follows its "compelling representation" in highly contextualized narrative form (Gilligan 1982), I had written:

Just as an answer to the question of what one's responsibilities are to one's friend is a highly contextual matter involving a detailed understanding of the precise threads of connectedness and intimacy involved, so an answer to what might be our moral relationship to the nonhuman environment depends upon (1) a complex understanding of what it is to be a human being, what it is to respond to another human being as a human being . . . , and (2) an understanding of how those complex webs of relationships that constitute the human moral community might expand to include the nonhuman. This sort of expansion of the moral community is ... a matter of trying to come to an understanding of what it might mean to care, to respond to something in the nonhuman environment as a member of one's moral community. (Cheney 1987,139-140)

I know that defining relations to the land are the deepest sources of knowledge for the indigenous inhabitants of North America, and this connection between land and knowledge, mediated by defining relations to the land, became, with this first paper, a recurring thread in my thoughts about environmental philosophy and ethics. Rolston's comments in Bowling Green, however, took me in another direction, beginning a second recurring thread of thought concerned with the relation between truth, knowledge and epistemology. These two threads became more and more intertwined as my thoughts about environmental philosophy became more deeply influenced by indigenous philosophy.

I had concluded my paper by saying: "To contextualize ethical deliberation is ... to provide a narrative, or story, from which the solution to the ethical dilemma emerges as [a] fitting conclusion" (Cheney 1987, 144). It was with this notion of narratively contextualized ethical deliberation that Rolston's words resonated. (In appreciation of Rolston's words, which both confirmed and extended my thoughts, I then decided to end my paper with words from his paper.) I received two gifts from Rolston on that occasion, each an aspect of what he calls "storied residence," extensions of Gilligan's thought to environmental ethics: (1) The notion of the ideographic dimension of an environmental ethic:

An ethics should be rational, but rationality inhabits a historical system. The place that is to be counted morally has a history; the ethics that befits such a place will take on historical form; the ethics will itself have a history. . . . Under [this] idiographic focus, ethical concern will be directed toward historical particulars, with minimal appeal to types or universals.

and (2) The notion of a narrative track through the world that is at once epistemological, evaluative, and descriptive:

The rationality of the ethic, as well as the area to be mapped, will be historical.... The move from ;'s to ought... is transformed into movement along a story line. (Rolston 1988, 341-342 and Rolston 1986)

If an idiographic focus is central to both environmental knowledge and to an environmental ethic, then defining relations to place are surely central elements in the production of this environmental/ethical knowledge. The narrative move from is to ought certainly thickens7 one's conception of truth in relation to knowledge (and has implications for epistemology as well). I think of it this way. Ecosystem descriptions have normative force within the context of human love of, and care and respect for, the land community and the sense of healthy community functioning which it exemplifies. Indeed, this love, care, and respect is implicit in the so-called descriptions themselves. The land community, under certain ecological "descriptions," is a moral community. This way of putting the matter is somewhat misleading, however. It suggests that values come first and dictate the ways in which we describe the world. Might we not turn this around and say that ecological descriptions of the land community exert a pull on values insofar as they locate human life within the life of the land community? That ecological descriptions, as they change, force us to rewrite accounts of human existence, value, and moral community? Better, perhaps, if we think instead of the co-evolution (and ultimate inseparability) of values and description (Cheney 1991).

Gilligan's articulation of the narrative dimension of an ethic of care and Rolston's notion of "storied residence" certainly cooled my interest in the focus on ethical and ontological abstractions in much of environmental philosophy (Cheney 1989, 1990, 1994). (It is a curious fact that my first thoughts concerning the idiographic importance of place in environmental ethics should have come to a focus in what for me was a nonplace, what Wendell Berry would call an "abstract" place: My short stay in Bowling Green consisted in walking a few blocks back and forth along an edge-of-town tourist business strip between motel and conference site. Unreal. Far from home, in a place that was for me no place at all, the notion of stoned residence came vibrantly alive. (Perhaps not so unusual, however strange: Much of environmental philosophy, it seems to me, expresses a kind of yearning for home.8)

Thinking about the narrative and idiographic dimensions of ethical deliberation suggested that those ethicists who find it appealing to first construct a "metaphysic of morals" that is consonant with contemporary ecological thought (as well as with contemporary high-energy physics) and, secondly and derivatively, construct an environmental ethic consonant with this "metaphysics of morals" had erroneously privileged metaphysics over epistemology. That is to say, it began to seem that one's idiographic and narrative track through the world is structured in part by what might be called an ur-epistemology that is at the same time an urethic. The "world" one lives within, if this is so, is given shape and texture by this ur-epistemology/ur- ethic. This ethic/epistemology, in dynamic reciprocity with experience, gives rise to the "world" within which one lives.

Karen Warren and I worked on one aspect of this issue in an exploration of methodological issues raised by hierarchy theory in contemporary biology:

As a methodological stance, hierarchy theory rejects the view that there is only one way to describe ecological phenomena. Which description is appropriate will depend upon the observation set and on what it is one is attempting to describe, explain, or predict. In this respect, hierarchy theory privileges methodological and epistemological considerations over ontology, the attempt to specify what is "really" in the world. The ontology embedded in both explanation and phenomena being explained is always a function of the appropriate observation set. Any grand attempt to provide one metaphysics of morals seems doomed because misguided: it puts the metaphysical/ ontological cart before the epistemological/methodological horse. (Warren and Cheney 1991, 185)"

The strategy of constructing an environmental ethic on the basis of a prior delineation of a metaphysics of morals also puts the ontological cart before at lease one critically important ethical horse-which I elaborate on presently, but first a word about words and world.

In my early "Postmodern Environmental Ethics" I suggested that "The truth of 'It's language all the way down' must be understood in light of the equal truth of 'It's world all the way up' " (Cheney 1989,120). Ten years later Anthony Weston and I found better words:

Contrary to the emphasis some place on the constructed nature of the worlds we live in, reflected in the catch phrase "It's words all the way down," we suggest a very different emphasis: "It's world all the way up". . ..

The poet Robert Bringhurst speaks of poetry as "knowing freed from the agenda of possession and control." He understands poetry as "knowing in the sense of stepping in tune with being, hearing and echoing the music and heartbeat of being."(Bringhurst 1993, 138). A friend [Irene Klaver] says of Indian Paintbrush-a plant we know well from the American West-that it "speaks the soil." Similarly, language is most fundamentally an expression of the world-it "speaks the world." Language is rooted in being, rooted in the world as are we who speak forth that world in our language. Our language is a mode of interaction with, and hence a mode of knowing, that world. Knowing can take shape as a form of domination and control. It can also take shape as a way of "stepping in tune with being."

Though the epistemologies of modernism detached themselves from the world-treating the nonhuman world and even the human world as objects of domination and control-and though the postmodern view of language and self (the self as solipsistic maker of worlds) to a large extent reflects this detachment, we and our languages are fundamentally of the world. Before they convey information, before they are assertions with "truth values," our words are a welling up of the world. The more-than-human world bursts forth in multiple songs of the world-human songs in a more-than-human world, songs rooted in, and expressive of, that world. They carry the power and energy of that world. (Cheney and Weston 1999, 124)

Multiple accounts of the world suggest the constructed and physically- as well as culturally-situated nature of knowledge at the intersection of self and nonhuman world, self and human culture, and the necessity of taking responsibility for positioned knowledge (precisely because it is positioned rather than abstract knowledge that is simply and universally true) (Haraway 1988). Multiple accounts suggest as well that multiple epistemologies are at work in the construction of knowledge, as I have indicated above in connection with hierarchy theory in the biological sciences. Physical and cultural contexts leave their mark on epistemologies. The locatability of knowledge and the accountability associated with this locatability further suggests that an ethic (or "ur"-ethic) is at least implicit in our epistemic encounters with the world. Thus, for example, an ethic of control is embedded in the epistemological model of the controlled experiment, whereas an ethic of nonmanipulative attentiveness is embodied in the epistemological model suggested by the science of phenology (Cheney 1998,1999, Hester et al. 2000, Cheney and Weston 1999).

Knowledge as expression of the world at the intersection of the human and the nonhuman also suggests the necessity and importance of acknowledging nature's participation in the construction of knowledge. The idea is basically Gregory Bateson's:

[A]ny ongoing ensemble of events and objects which has the appropriate complexity of causal circuits and the appropriate energy relations will surely show mental characteristics. It will compare, that is, be responsive to difference. ... It will "process information" and will inevitably be self-corrective either toward homeostatic optima or toward the maximization of certain variables.... [N]o part of such an internally interactive system can have unilateral control over the remainder or over any other part. The mental characteristics are inherent or immanent in the ensemble as a whole. . . . The network is not bounded by the skin but includes all external pathways along which information can travel. It also includes those effective differences which are immanent in the "objects" of such information. It includes the pathways of sound and light along which travel transforms of differences originally immanent in things and other people-and especially in our own actions. (Bateson 1972, 315-319)10

Mind inheres in nature. I like the way the Zen Buddhist philosopher Dogen and the poet Gary Snyder put it:

"Whoever told people that 'Mind' means thoughts, opinions, ideas, and concepts? Mind means trees, fence posts, tiles, and grasses," says Dogen ... in his funny cryptic way. (Snyder 1990, 20)

In one of his talks Dogen said: "To carry yourself forward and experience myriad things is delusion. But myriad things coming forth and experiencing themselves is awakening." Applying this to language theory, I think it suggests that when occidental logos-oriented philosophers uncritically advance language as a unique human gift which serves as the organizer of the chaotic universe-it is a delusion. The subtle and many-layered cosms of the universe have found their own way into symbolic structure and have given us thousands of tawny human-language grammars. (Snyder 1990, 76-77)

To say "It's world all the way up" rather than "It's words all the way down" is liberating. It frees us to listen rather than merely impose our will on nature. To stress listening is not to suggest a passive epistemological relationship to the world. To listen to the world is an active process, a way of engaging the world every bit as active and reciprocal as listening to a friend in order to know her better.

One of the central themes of my "Postmodern Environmental Ethics" is the thought that the central role of natural environments in the production of knowledge is to reduce the parochial element of human knowledge. Relying heavily on the work of Paul Shepard in Nature and Madness, I argued that only by enlarging the scope of our conversational partners to include the natural environment in which we live can we envision the possibility of reaching the "transcendental limits" of our necessarily parochial knowledge. I have in mind, here, Sabina Lovibond's distinction between "transcendental parochialism" and "empirical parochialism." She recommends an "anti-ascetic philosophy . . . compelling our recognition of the bodily aspect of knowledge" in which our beliefs and concerns "will necessarily be the beliefs [and concerns] of creatures with a certain physical constitution and a certain ecological location." Acceptance of this view, in turn,

. . . amounts to an acquiescence in what we might describe as a 'transcendental parochialism': a renunciation of the (ascetically-motivated) impulse to escape from the conceptual scheme to which, as creatures with a certain kind of body and environment, we are transcendentally related.... [However,] as long as we can form the concrete conception of a less arbitrary description of the world-as long as we can find other rational persons or communities, by reference to whose worldview new symptoms of (empirical) parochialism in our own world-view can be identified-there will still be ground to cover in order to emancipate ourselves from such parochialism. (Lovibond 1983,210,217)"

What Shepard adds to Lovibond's argument is the idea that if we test our world-views only against those of other human communities, we are far from emancipating ourselves from "empirical parochialism." Indeed, the brunt of his argument is that we, in our very nature as homo sapiens sapiens, are so deeply embedded in the natural world around us that only by renewing sustained communication with the geo- and biological world which made us the beings we are through long stretches of evolutionary time can we escape an ever-increasing descent into what we might call "species autism." Again: What we become in our modern isolation from the world which gave us birth as the species we are, in our insistence that we are the knowers and the nonhuman world is merely the object of our knowing, is an autistic diminishment of what we are when we engage in active and reciprocal communication with the world around us. What the natural world provides (and what we can come to understand and emulate only through sustained communication with that world) is the fullest, most complete model of health and well-being available to us as the ecologically embodied creatures we are. If we draw a circle around our existence as humans and draw our models of health and well-being only from within this human circle, we effectively cut ourselves off from the source of our own species existence, a source that not only brought us into existence, but one that continually nourishes us.

The Lovibond-Shepard argument is powerful. As "creatures with a certain physical constitution and a certain ecological location" our knowledge is necessarily parochial (transcendentally parochial), but we need not accept the myriad forms of empirical parochialism in which we are currently mired. Active and reciprocal communication with the source of our species existence alone-the natural world-can enable us to reach the transcendental limits of this parochialism. When we become the creatures we are in this way, we will then once again become what Aldo Leopold hoped for us: plain members and citizens of the land community (Leopold 1970, 24O).12

Once we have acknowledged the ethical dimension of the epistemologies we bring to the world, the physically and culturally situated nature of knowledge and the ethical and political responsibility that goes along with this, and nature's participation in the construction of knowledge-as Henry Sharp puts it: "symbols, ideas, and language ... are not passive ways of perceiving a determined positivist reality but a mode of interaction shared between [people] and their environment" (Sharp 1988, 144-145)-it is but a short step to Nelson Goodman and Catherine Elgin's conclusion that "defeat and confusion are built into the notions of truth and certainty and knowledge." Perhaps we should, as do Goodman and Elgin, relegate these notions to the periphery of philosophical concern and centralize concepts of "rightness," "adoption," and "understanding" instead. One alternative to such a shift in terminology would be to radically rethink our notions of knowledge and truth.

All these issues and conclusions have come to a focus in my work on the linked notions of "ceremonial worlds" and narrative, which I began to think about while listening to indigenous people in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, in 1995 and in Thunder Bay, Ontario, while working with the Native Philosophy Project during 1996-97 (Cheney and Weston 1999, Hester et al. 2000). Ceremonial worlds are the worlds-or stories-within which we live, the worlds-myths, if you like-that have the power to orient us in life. They define for us the nature of the sacred (that in which meaning is located, the more-than-human dimensions of our worlds), the natural, and the human-and the relationships between them. A starting place for me in developing the notion of a ceremonial world was Louise Profeit-LeBlanc's explication of the Northern Tutchone term "tti an oh" in response to a question posed to her concerning whether the stories she used in her work with at risk children were "true." In response, she used the term "tti an oh" (usually glossed as "what they say, it's true") and defined it as meaning "correctly true," "responsibly true" (a "responsible truth"), "true to what you believe in," "what is good for you and the community," and "rings true for everybody's wellbeing."13 "TM an oh" suggests an alternative to (or a variant of) Goodman and Elgin's way around the "defeat and confusion . . . built into the notions of truth and .. . knowledge."

Making use of Austin's notion of the performative function of language, a ceremonial world (in the fullest sense of the term) is an actively constructed portrait of the world intended to be responsibly true, one which rings true for everybody's well-being. It is a world built on the basis of an ethical-epistemological orientation of attentiveness rather than an epistemology of control. Such ceremonial worlds, built, as they are, around the notion of responsible truth, are not developed piecemeal, but are synthetic creations, adjusted holistically to all the concerns that arise from a focus on responsible truth: they must tie down to the world of everyday practice and experience in a way that makes it possible to survive; they must orient the community and its individuals on roads of life that allow for the flourishing of all members of the community as far as that is possible. The metaphysics or ontology of such a world will not be understood as true in the modernist sense of the term. The issue is always (if implicitly) whether it is responsibly, or correctly, true; is it action guiding in the full sense just delineated?

In this full sense of the term, ceremonial worlds exist, so far as I know, only in indigenous cultures. All of us live within ceremonial worlds in some sense, however, though nonindigenous ceremonial worlds tend to be diminished worlds. The ceremonial worlds of the West, for example, are diminished in the sense that they are not intended to be responsibly true worlds, ones that ring true for everybody's well-being. Nor are they worlds built on the basis of an ethical-epistemological orientation of attentiveness. Rather, these worlds pretend to be value-neutral true accounts of how the world really is. The so-called value-neutral project of building a true account of the way the world is is severed from the project of creating a world in which humans can and do flourish. Moreover, these ceremonial worlds tend to be built in accordance with epistemologies of domination and control. Such worlds are mired in the defeat and confusion of which Goodman and Elgin speak: Epistemologies of domination are used to build portraits of the world within which we propose ethical projects to defeat domination and control. This odd and unfortunate situation arises because we do not see that our world-building projects are themselves founded (though implicitly) on ethical (or "ur"ethical) epistemological foundations that all but guarantee that the explicitly ethical projects we set ourselves within these worlds will fail.

What one would no doubt expect in a world (1) that is rich in bioand geo-diversity and (2) in which the development of ceremonial worlds in the full sense is the norm would be a world marked not merely by cultural pluralism but by the acceptance and embracing of cultural pluralism. Radical relativism is not an inevitable or even likely result since grounds for rational criticism of existing ceremonial worlds and the practices called forth by those worlds are built into the very notion of responsible truth as spelled out above and, indeed, built into the integrity of the geo/biological worlds within which these cultures exist. Since in such a world there would be no search for the one truth of Enlightenment epistemology, one would also expect modes of examining ceremonial worlds that take account both of the purpose of constructing such worlds and the likelihood (inevitability, really, given the bio- and geo-diversity of the natural homes of these worlds) of many worlds satisfying that requirement. Given my particular idiographic track through the world, two such methods come to mind: Goodman and Elgin's "reconception of philosophy" and Indian storytelling.

Goodman and Elgin shift their focus from truth, certainty, and knowledge to Tightness, adoption, and understanding (respectively). "Rightness is a matter of fitting and working....[,] fitting into a context or discourse or standing complex of other symbols. . . . The fitting is tested by the working, by the forwarding of work in hand or in prospect." Goodman and Elgin are not offering a coherence or pragmatic theory of truth; they are recommending that we switch our focus from truth to Tightness, "a concept with greater reach than truth." As a replacement for certainty Goodman and Elgin propose, not "alternatives such as probability, belief, and assent," but adoption. "Adoption is a matter of putting to work, of making or trying to make a fit. . . . Adoption does not imply any degree of confidence. . . . [T]he overall effort is toward achieving a relatively durable but flexible and productive network of adoptions." "Finally, knowledge ... gives way ... to understanding. ... 'Understanding' is a versatile term for a skill, a process, an accomplishment. First, the understanding is what might be called the cognitive 'faculty' in an inclusive sense: the collection of abilities to inquire and invent, discriminate and discover, connect and clarify, order and organize, adopt, test, reject. second, understanding is the process of using such skills for the cognitive making and remaking of a world, worlds, or a world of worlds" (Goodman and Elgin 1988, 155-161).

Lee Hester, an indigenous philosopher and colleague, weighs the virtues of Indian storytelling against the claim that the self-critical method of Western science rightly privileges its method over other methods of establishing knowledge claims:

The claim that Western science is self-critical and therefore privileged . . . seems to imply that other traditions, since they aren't privileged in this way, are not self-critical (or not as self-critical). This is a dubious conclusion at best. Arguably, indigenous peoples are far more self-critical than Euro-Americans. They engage in self-criticism communally, over the long haul, and expect that there will always be dissension because there really are different stories. We might call this "unself-conscious examined interaction." It comes quite naturally, isn't forced, isn't artificial, and doesn't have a rigid protocol-all to the good: it gives a flexibility of mind that Western science doesn't have. The way indigenous peoples engage in self-criticism, along with the results of that criticism, just appears uncritical to the outside observer. Indigenous people swap stories and come to understand each other better and understand the various ways of examining the subject matter of the stories better. They aren't uncritical. It is just another form of criticism and arguably should stand indigenous people in better epistemic stead than any form of privilege-assuming self-conscious self-criticism, if only because it doesn't and never would claim primacy and privilege. Indigenous peoples know that their stories differ from those of most Western science. The stories of Western science are good for some things and indigenous stories are good too. But to suggest that indigenous people are not self-critical in the way that supposedly stands Western science in such good stead is arrogant and misguided. (Hester et al. 2000)

Indian storytelling sits nicely with Goodman and Elgin's reconception. Indian storytelling techniques do seem to forego conceptions of truth, certainty, and knowledge (as knowledge is understood when linked to the notion of truth) in favor of Tightness, adoption, and understanding. If knowledge is understood in terms of the empowerment that comes with understanding, then we have a notion of knowledge that does not require truth. The notion of responsible truth, in turn, is easily explicated in terms of rightness, adoption, and understanding.

When thinking back over my use of other voices through the yearsGilligan, Rolston, Haraway, Nagarjuna, Bringhurst, and others-my sense is that these voices play through my papers as stories, or fragments of stories. I have understood them to be voicing responsible understandings, or elements of a larger story that might provide a responsible understanding of the world. These voices are "true to" my experience in the world, they center me, connect me, orient me; they do some of the things responsible truths are intended to do. I don't so much argue on their behalf in my writing as simply let them speak and build a collage that is plausible in relationship to my experience, one which opens up the possibility of communication with, and invites reciprocity with, human and more-than-human worlds. Given the narrative source of my philosophy, and its narrative (as opposed to argumentative) complexity, it should be understood as a story for contemplation rather than as asserting truth claims.

While returning from a bush walk in an old growth Tingle-Karri forest in southwestern Australia to Murdoch University with members of the Ecophilosophy and Earth Education class I was in Western Australia to help teach, Cathy Fussell helped me understand philosophy narratively. Philosophers need not actually write stories, she said (although that would be an excellent alternative to much of what goes on in academia, I think); we just need to rethink what it is we philosophers are doing now. We need to think of our present work narratively, as stories that are being told within larger narratives, and that in that sense we are participating in the narrative reconstruction of our understandings of the world, understandings that might be responsible or irresponsible. This could be transforming. We might come to prize responsible understandings over some illusory search for the way the world "really is."

III

At a campfire in the Lemhi Range of east central Idaho with Tom Birch and Anthony Weston, Anthony asked, "Why do we go into the wilderness?" After a thoughtful pause,Tom replied, "Wilderness treats me like a human being." Tom's response has been with me for a long time. It is a Zen koan with endless depth, and I keep coming back to it from different angles (Cheney 1997). One thought about it, with which I begin, comes from Paul Shepard: The earth matrix is our caretaker in the broadest sense (Shepard 1982). That humans have survived as a species for a long time means that we have a place in the scheme of things-a niche, adaptive fit. We live in a world of gifts: air, food, shelter, a rich, complex, and diverse world as stimulus to the development of our complex minds and the variety of human cultures. Evolution has shaped us to fit these gifts-else they would not be gifts. Erik Erikson says that basic trust is a fundamental condition of well-being, "it is the first and basic wholeness, for it seems to imply that the inside and the outside can be experienced as an interrelated goodness" (Erikson 1968, 82). Basic trust in the world of gifts that shaped us and sustains us, a basic sense of belonging in the world, a living sense that knowledge, understanding, and wisdom emerge from deep and sustained conversation and communion with the earth matrix and the creatures and land forms embedded in it, is the most fundamental, the most essential trust of all. Achieving full maturity depends upon it.

Basic trust is not blind trust, thoughtless and passive. Basic trust is a condition within which we are enabled to develop (and receive!) the skills and the maturity that make us both deserving of the world's gifts and able to use them (and pass them on) with appropriate thanks given. Having equipped us well for life, the more-than-human world becomes our consummate teacher, according us true and unqualified respect. It does not jerk us around, it does not manipulate us; it treats us like human beings. It is not a paradox (as it might seem) that basic trust is a condition that enables us to develop the skills needed to face life's dangers and gifts with clarity and some measure of success (maybe, most of the time; there are no guarantees). Basic trust urges us to thank the world, not ourselves, for the skills and maturity basic trust has enabled us to acquire. The notion of basic trust has epistemological implications. With basic trust, one studies the world differently, builds ceremonial worlds with a different epistemological orientation: attentive openness to the world's processes and possibilities rather than a guarded and fearful wariness and need to control life's processes.

Western attitudes toward nature are by and large shaped from within culture-to the exclusion of the nonhuman environment as conversational partner in the shaping of these attitudes-by an epistemology of domination. Environmental philosophy is an attempt to step beyond this parochialism, but it, also, is by-and-large a gesture made from within culture, on cultures terms (Weston 1992). We can take paths that lead to less parochial results.14 Joseph Meeker suggests such a path, building on a surprising thesis: Biological life-and, I would add, geological life-is essentially comédie (Meeker 1997). For example, basing his analysis on a classical understanding of comedy,15 Meeker says that

Evolution proceeds as an unscrupulous, opportunistic comedy, the object of which appears to be the proliferation and preservation of as many life forms as possible. Successful participants in it are those who live and reproduce even when times are hard or dangerous, not those who are best able to destroy enemies or competitors. Its ground rules for participants, including people, are those that govern literary comedy: Organisms must adapt themselves to their circumstances in every possible way, must studiously avoid all-or-nothing choices, must seek alternatives to death, must accept and revel in maximum diversity, must accommodate themselves to the accidental limitations of birth and environment, and must prefer cooperation to competition, yet compete successfully when necessary.... The comic way is to be found in evolutionary history, in the processes of ecology, and in comic literature, which may represent the closest we have come to describing humans as adaptive animals. Comedy illustrates that survival depends upon our ability to change ourselves rather than our environment.... Comedy is a strategy for living that contains ecological wisdom, and it may be one of our best guides as we try to retain a place for ourselves among the other animals that live according to the comic way. (Meeker 1997, 21-22)

Comedic existence for humans demands knowledge of a particular kind: that which results from clear-eyed attentiveness to wild systemsand to human systems understood as wild systems16-with an eye to both survival and an answer to the question of what constitutes the good life for homo sapiens sapiens, understood as a member of a wider land community, using an epistemology appropriate to the comic/evolutionary goal of adaptive fit. It seems to me that indigenous knowledge fits this model as forms of knowledge privileged in the West do not.

An epistemology of clear-eyed attentiveness with an eye to adaptive fit rather than control of one's environment is precisely what many indigenous people in North America are referring to when they use the English word respect. In a discussion of the Ojibwa conception of respect with my Ojibwa colleague Dennis McPherson, he insisted strongly that respect is about survival, not ethics (understood as moral law). Dennis's remarks fit nicely with those made by Carol Geddes in response to a question posed to her concerning the meaning of the indigenous notion of respect. She replied: "I asked a similar question of someone who knows the Tlingit language very well [Geddes is herself Tlingit]. Apparently it does not have a very precise definition in translation-the way it is used in English. It is more like awareness. It is more like knowledge and that is a very important distinction, because it is not like a moral law, it is more like something that is just a part of your whole awareness" (Geddes 1996, 46). It should be noted that survival and adaptive fit are understood more broadly in an Indian context than they are in non-Indian contexts. For example, Indian sacred ways and practices are understood as "practical systems of knowledge" for survival, "survival" being understood not merely as "continuing to exist" but more broadly as "seeking life," seeking the proper road of life on which to walk.171 am using "adaptive fit" in this broader sense, linking human well-being with adaptive fit, as does Meeker. The comic way as a strategy for living on earth's terms rather than ours makes eminently good sense. Adaptive fit as the key to well-being implies that we cannot understand what the good life is for homo sapiens sapiens without listening to what the natural environments we live in have to say to us about this. This is so since we are the animals we are because of the generative earth matrix that produced us and now sustains us. We are deeply embedded in this matrix. Communication within this matrix produced us and continued communication between humans and the earth matrix is necessary for survival and well-being.

Should the comic way also be a strategy for our relationship to other human beings-earth beings, surely, but earth beings who all-too-often resist living on earth's terms but, rather, seek domination and control of earth's processes? What would it be like for one with basic trust in the world of gifts that shaped us to face humans as one (usually) faces the weather: realistically, without moral outrage, without moral complaint, with neither idealism nor romantic sentiment; that is, with the same respect nature accords us?18 Meeker's study of picaresque comedy can (without too much of a stretch) be understood as a thought experiment in envisioning human comedic existence in relationship to human culture for one who stands outside that culture.19

The picaresque world is a natural system in which humans are one of the animal species. The picaro ... sees society [in relationship to which he is an outcast] as one of the many forms of natural order. He objects to the society into which he is born no more than wolves or ants or whales object to theirs, and like these animals, he tries merely to adapt himself to his circumstances in the interest of his own survival. . . . Picaresque nature is not a garden, but a wilderness. (Meeker 1997, 58-59)

But should this picaresque model of adaptive fit be a model for those of us who are not outsiders but who would critique and oppose human individuals and cultures that do not live on earth's terms? To envision a picaresque-like life within culture and its mode of response (or resistance) to humans who do not live on earth's terms, we must, first of all, envision responses, or forms of resistance, developed around a central defining feature of Indian cultures: the notion of "responsible truth." secondly, these responses must be consistent with the notion of adaptive fit central to the comedy of survival. They must face problems in some way homologous to the way in which one faces the weather: realistically, without moral outrage or complaint, with neither idealism nor romantic sentiment.

The basic ingredient of such strategies is that they would not so much attempt to meet and defeat moral error as such as they would seek to return the world to biological normalcy by means of the strategies of comedy-biological normalcy and the strategies of comedy as defined above in Meeker's depiction of the comedy of evolution. Another way to put this is to say that comedy resists fighting on terms set by the forces of domination and control. Comedy would prefer to "count coup" on these forces in ways that return them to their senses (and away from their ideologies), return them to the comedy of survival and away from the tragedy of ideologies that float free of the earth (or try to). Note that such strategies would exemplify the biological condition-the comedy of survival-they promote and attempt to establish, as strategies of hierarchical control (e.g., the judicial system) do not. ("To live outside the law you must be [comic]"-Dylan.)

A charming example of comedic strategy was brought to my attention in a discussion of Meeker's The Comedy of Survival in the Ecophilosophy and Earth Education class. In an action attempting to halt old growth clearcutting, forest activists threaded yarn through the area to be logged. The loggers brought the mighty force of their chainsaws to bear on these spidery webs of yarn only to find them hopelessly jammed and rendered useless. One would hope that the absurdity, irony, and pointed social and political (including, obviously, sexual political) commentary provided by such actions would bring any sane person back to earth. It would be a humorless person indeed who could respond to such a commentary with a straight face. -Well, of course, there are such humorless people, and so we can only speculate at this point about whether, and to what extent, comedy has the power to bring us to our senses, back to earth. If it cannot, this is a sad commentary on human alienation from the natural world.

Indian knowledge of the natural world, as I have said, is based on an epistemology of respect requiring attentive listening to, and reciprocal communication with, the earth and is woven together within ceremonial worlds designed to accommodate human culture within (and as) a wild world. This knowledge is, essentially, a comedic way of being in the natural world rather than a tragic separation and alienation from that world. Western knowledge, on the other hand, is often designed to bend or assimilate wild systems to cultural order and purpose. It therefore employs epistemologies of domination and control of both the nonhuman world and other humans and human cultures. In this difference we find very different understandings of the relevance of natural environments to the production of knowledge.

From the perspective of indigenous cultures one could read the motto of the picaresque hero of Thomas Mann's novel, Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man-"He who really loves the world shapes himself to please it"-as the idea that nature's integrity becomes the model of individual and social integrity. As an example, consider the following: Choctaws, when they moved to a new area, looked around and saw that deer grazed in the lush meadows, the meadows which would be perfect for raising corn, beans, and squash. But the deer were using this land, so Choctaws chose land not nearly as good for agricultural purposes. Why? Because, presumably, though deer did not have the ability to make hardscrabble land speak meadow, Choctaws had the ability to make it speak corn, squash, and beans (Lee Hester, in conversation).

IV20

Vine Deloria, Jr. has given us a portrait of the epistemological relationship to the physical world of the "old Indians, people who had known the life of freedom before they were confined to the reservations and subjected to Western religious and educational systems" (Deloria 1999a, 43) that resonates remarkably with the ideas I have been developing and takes them a significant step further.21 I use elements of Deloria's portrait here as a case study of the viability of these ideas. "The old Indians," Deloria says,

were interested in finding the proper moral and ethical road upon which human beings should walk. All knowledge, if it is to be useful, was directed toward that goal. Absent in this approach was the idea that knowledge existed apart from human beings and their communities, and could stand alone for "its own sake." In the Indian conception, it was impossible that there could be abstract propositions that could be used to explore the structure of the physical world. Knowledge was derived from individual and communal experiences in daily life, in keen observation of the environment and in interpretive messages that they received from spirits in ceremonies, visions, and dreams. In formulating their understanding of the world, Indians did not discard any experience. Everything had to be included in the spectrum of knowledge and related to what was already known. (Deloria 1999a, 43-44)"

To use a phrase of Deloria's, we might call the idea that "in formulating their understanding of the world, Indians did not discard any experience" a "principle of epistemological method." Another principle of epistemological method appears, Deloria says, at the end of Black Elk's telling of how the Sioux received the sacred pipe from White Buffalo Calf Woman and how she taught the people to communicate with the higher powers through the use of the pipe in ceremonies: "This they tell" Black Elk said, "and whether it happened so or not, I do not know; but if you think about it, you can see that it is true." Deloria explicitly calls this statement "a principle of epistemological method" (44). The idea here is more complex than the first principle. As I read it, this second principle points to two ideas: (1) that the account of Buffalo Calf Woman is not necessarily to be understood in literalist, historical terms; the account is to be understood as a depiction of one element of the ceremonial world within which the Oglala Sioux live23 and (2) that we must always consider (over the course of one's entire life) the ways (often multiple) that a particular story or experience might instruct us; stories and experience are to be understood as having often inexhaustible depth. A third principle of epistemological principle (not explicitly stated as such) is that "'everything that humans experience has value and instructs us in some aspect of life" (45) (all emphases added).

These three, closely-related principles might be contrasted with a more critical epistemological method which focuses on refutation and critical objection as the way to truth. In this epistemological style, for example, one might object that the second principle would certainly lead one astray and that the third principle is simply false (or, at least, has not been shown to be true). It should be noted, however, that to shift the burden of proof in this way does not so much advance the cause of truth as it shuts down modes of reflecting on experience and stories that may very well lead to insight and knowledge and to "responsible truth." The point is similar to one Anthony Weston makes concerning Tom Birch's notion of universal considerability. Birch says that his principle demands that all things "be taken as valuable, even though we may not yet know how or why, until they are proved otherwise" (Birch 1993, 328). Weston comments: "Actually, even more deeply, universal consideration requires us not merely to extend this kind of benefit of the doubt but actively to take up the case, so to speak, for beings so far excluded or devalued." Weston then adds, precisely in line with the Indian view that at the heart of one's epistemological relation to the world there must be moral purpose, that "ethics [a basic etiquette] is primary: ethics opens the way to knowledge, epistemology is value-driven, not vice versa" (Cheney and Weston 1999, 120).

This epistemological style of openness contrasts with the focus on extracting very specific pieces of information, understood within an equally specific set of concepts, that characterizes the controlled experiment of modern science. Deloria in fact contrasts Indian epistemology with Thomas Kuhn's understanding of science as proceeding within paradigms and as being therefore highly selective both in its attention to data and the problems on which it chooses to focus.

Indian epistemological style, as depicted by Deloria, is even more radical than I have so far indicated. The principles of epistemological method so far mentioned are at least straightforwardly epistemological. But Deloria goes further. Many statements coming from Indian worlds which non-Indians would understand to be statements of belief concerning Indian world views are best understood as principles of epistemological method of a rather different sort than those so far mentioned. Consider, for example, Deloria's portrait of the universe as a moral universe:

The real interest of the old Indians was not to discover the abstract structure of physical reality but rather to find the proper road along which, for the duration of a person's life, individuals were supposed to walk. This colorful image of the road suggests that the universe is a moral universe. That is to say, there is a proper way to live in the universe: There is a content to every action, behavior, and belief. The sum total of our life experiences has a reality. There is a direction to the universe, empirically exemplified in the physical growth cycles of childhood, youth, and old age, with the corresponding responsibility of every entity to enjoy life, fulfill itself, and increase in wisdom and the spiritual development of personality. Nothing has incidental meaning and there are no coincidences. ... In the moral universe all activities, events, and entities are related, and consequently it does not matter what kind of existence an entity enjoys, for the responsibility is always there for it to participate in the continuing creation of reality. (Deloria 1999a, 46)

These attributes of the moral universe have the same status as the three epistemological principles discussed above. That is, in relationship to the goal of finding the proper road upon which to walk, Indians paint a portrait of a moral universe that invites its own fulfillment,24 they create a ceremonial world that gives direction to the quest for moral understanding and support for living in accordance with that moral understanding. The characteristics of the moral life are not deduced from, or suggested by, a prior value-neutral account of the structure of the universe or "metaphysics of morals"; rather, once again, "ethics opens the way to knowledge, epistemology is value-driven, not vice versa." This portrait of a moral universe is not properly understood as a set of false (or at least unproven) beliefs or assumptions. Such a view puts "too much stock in the word 'philosophy'." As Deloria's account shows, in the words of the quotation that stands at the beginning of the present essay, "there are alternative ways of intelligently engaging the world. To construe one's thinking in terms of belief is characteristic of a particular kind of world view" and indigenous peoples do not seem to "conceive of experience in such an overtly intellectualized manner." Ceremonial worlds do not interfere with, or contradict the projects of Western science, though they arguably provide a better understanding of human existence in the natural world than does Western science, for they place communication and reciprocity with natural environments, rather than the desire to dominate those environments, at the very heart of the production of knowledge.

Indian thought on the notion that the universe is alive is truly remarkable. "It cannot be argued," Deloria says, "that the universe is moral or has a moral purpose without simultaneously maintaining that the universe is alive. The old Indians had no problem with this concept because they experienced life in everything, and there was no reason to suppose that the continuum of life was not universal" (49). Is this a scientific claim with supporting experiential evidence? A metaphysical world view? Not likely in view of our discussion to this point. But Indian thinking concerning what they think of as a living planet is more revealing yet:

The practical criterion that is always cited to demonstrate its validity is the easily observable fact that the earth nurtures smaller forms of life-people, plants, birds, animals, rivers, valleys, and continents. For Indians, both speculation and analogy end at this point. To go further and attribute a plenitude of familiar human characteristics to the earth is unwarranted. It would cast the planet in the restricted clothing of lesser beings, and we would not be able to gain insights and knowledge about the real essence of the earth. (49-50)

If speculation and analogy end where Indians end it, then the idea of the living earth isn't even speculative: it is obvious on the face of it. Not that it can't be denied, but at that point speculation, theory construction, or metaphysics is necessary. The last sentence in the quotation puts another twist on the matter: It folds the idea of the living earth into a ceremonial world orienting Indians on the moral road. The notion of a living world is not part of an Indian world view, it is an everyday observation fitted into a ceremonial world in a way that enhances its epistemological effectiveness.25 That is, by casting humans as lesser beings in relation to the living earth, we more effectively "gain insights and knowledge about the real essence of the earth": "Coming last, human beings were the 'younger brothers' of the other life-forms and therefore had to learn everything from these creatures. Thus human activities resembled bird and animal behavior in many ways and brought the unity of conscious life to an objective focus" (50).

The notion of a living universe, therefore, is not merely obvious on the face of it, but it also provides epistemological direction in the search for knowledge (as just stated) as well as powerful moral direction. The epistemological direction is itself ethically informed, as we have seen. There is more:

The living universe requires mutual respect among its members, and this suggests that a strong sense of individual identity and self is a dominant characteristic of the world as we know it. The willingness of entities to allow others to fulfill themselves, and the refusal of any entity to intrude thoughtlessly on another, must be the operative principle of this universe. Consequently, self-knowledge and self-discipline are high values of behavior.... Respect... involves two attitudes. One attitude is the acceptance of self-discipline by humans and their communities to act responsibly toward other forms of life. The other attitude is to seek to establish communications and covenants with other forms of life on a mutually agreeable basis. (50-51)

These conclusions aren't forced upon us by the notion of a living universe, of course, but they are the sorts of conclusions one might expect within a ceremonial world built around the moral purpose of "finding the proper moral and ethical road upon which human beings should walk." They extend in quite natural ways (1) the general attitude of universal consideration discussed earlier as a feature of Indian worlds as well as (2) our earlier reflections on the geo/biological world as seen through the lenses of Meeker's notion of the "comedy of survival" and Birch's thought that "wilderness treats me like a human being."

The central value that informs Deloria's principles of epistemological method is that of "adaptive fit"-finding the proper road upon which human beings should walk-rather than the values of domination and control. Oriented to the natural world by a set of what non-Indians would think of as beliefs about the world but which are better understood as a set of epistemological guidelines, those who adopt these guidelines become remarkably attuned to what the world tells them about human adaptive fit in the larger more-than-human land community. Just as the land community is the source of human existence and the knowledge encoded in the human body, so it continues to play the central role in the production of knowledge. Knowledge shaped by indigenous principles of epistemological method guarantee that knowledge is the result of deep and continuous communication between person and natural world. Epistemologies shaped by values of domination and control of nature virtually guarantee that the resulting "knowledge"-certainly not wisdom-is a human monologue that structures its understanding of the world around human order and purpose. The world is not permitted to speak on its own behalf. It merely answers questions posed by human culture and answers these questions, not in its own voice, but in a vocabulary, and according to an agenda, not its own. In Francis Bacon's graphic imagery, nature is put on the rack and forced to confess. Indian epistemology, by contrast, is marked by respect. To repeat:

Respect . . . involves two attitudes. One attitude is the acceptance of self-discipline by humans and their communities to act responsibly toward other forms of life. The other attitude is to seek to establish communications and covenants with other forms of life on a mutually agreeable basis.

V

In this concluding section I sketch in summary fashion two fundamentally different understandings of the relevance of natural environments to the production of knowledge. I have suggested that indigenous knowledge is based on an epistemology of respect woven within ceremonial worlds designed to accommodate human culture within (and as) a wild world. Western knowledge, on the other hand, is largely designed to bend or assimilate wild systems to cultural order and purpose. It therefore employs epistemologies of domination and control. In this difference we find very different understandings of the relevance of natural environments to the production of knowledge. Or, more precisely put, we find very different understandings of the relevance of our epistemological orientation within the natural world to the emergence of knowledge.

Lack of basic trust in the earth matrix as the fundamental sustaining matrix of human life and meaning tends to foster a need to control natural environments for human purposes. This need to control, in turn, generates epistemologies of domination and control. This development tends to be tied to a conception of nonhuman nature as less-than-human, to the objectification of nature, and to the location of meaning and value within the human or in the purposes of a transcendent deity. In such a world, an objective, value-neutral conception of truth seems all but inevitable. Epistemologies of domination and control tend to emphasize knowledge of the world that figures in practices of control and manipulation, and true descriptions of the world are understood as those which describe the world in value-free terms and make the world available for manipulation.

Basic trust in the earth matrix as the fundamental sustaining matrix of human life and meaning, on the other hand, lends itself to a complex epistemology that, with its clear-eyed attentiveness to the nonhuman world, is enormously practical, serving the end of survival well. Since "survival" encompasses the notion of "seeking life," we can also say that this epistemology of respect seeks life: It brings into being an understanding of the world in which the meaning of life is embedded in the natural world. Understanding of the natural world is mythically contoured in a way that is epistemologically sound, opening up, as it does, the possibilities of reciprocity and communication with the nonhuman world. These mythical contours also serve to delineate the proper road along which to walk. Meaning is embedded in things, events, and processes. Attentiveness is more inclusive and encompassing. Responsible truth is the operative concept of truth.

Western understandings of the natural world are mythically contoured as well, of course, but these mythical contours are buried as "subtexts" of science and culture, creating the illusion that the world is as we describe it. Of late, certainly, it has become widely understood that human projects are "inscribed" in our understanding of the world, leading some postmodernists to argue that "it's words all the way down," words shaped by human projects. The odd result of the attempt to excise myth from the Western project of understanding the world is that we have, largely, a fragmented cluster of technological understandings of bits of the world filtered through the epistemological lens of manipulation and control. Such knowledge is parochial indeed.

Indian worlds, on the other hand, exemplify an epistemology that leads into deeper and deeper, more and more inclusive, communication and reciprocity with the nonhuman world. The world of American Indians Deloria describes is not human centered but Other centered. This world is less parochial because it is Other centered. This knowledge does not step outside the human "form of life," as no human knowledge can, and, to that extent, exhibits the inescapable parochialism of our biological existence as the animal species we are. Nor, of course, does it step outside its own particular form of historical-cultural situatedness. But, in being Other centered in virtue of the epistemological principles it exemplifies, this knowledge surely transcends the parochialism of much that passes for knowledge in the West. Indian "principles of epistemological method" together constitute an epistemology of adaptive fit by the way in which they open up modes of reflection on experience and stories: they orient Indians in a world understood as alive (even down to the bedrock), capable of reciprocity and communication; and they constitute the relation between humans and nonhumans (again, even down to the bedrock) as a moral relation. Such an epistemology of adaptive fit is, almost by definition, an epistemology that leads away from the parochialism of Western conceptions of the way in which natural environments figure into the production of knowledge, and toward a more cosmopolitan, inclusive knowing that acknowledges fundamental moral relationships (covenants) that hold the world together as a moral community.

The differences in the ways in which Indian and Western understandings of the land figure in the "production of knowledge" is given poignant and precise expression in the following passage from Deloria's "Out of Chaos":

[T]Ke real exile of the [Indian] tribes occurred with the destruction of ceremonial life and the failure or inability of white society to offer a sensible and cohesive alternative to the traditions which Indians remembered. People became disoriented with respect to the world in which they lived. They could not practice their old ways, and the new ways which they were expected to learn were in a constant state of change because they were not a cohesive view of the world but simply adjustments which whites were making to the technology they had invented. (Deloria 1999b,247)

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