The Tribe, the Text, and the Land: Judaism, Pragmatism, and Native American Thought

This paper places the Textual Reasoning approach to Jewish thought into dialogue with particular strands of Native American thought about the nature and role of land, place, and the more-than-human relatives of human beings, including plants, animals, and the earth itself. Peter Ochs’ dialogues with teachers like Max Kadushin and David Weiss Halivni are shown to share logical patterns with Robert Warrior and Daniel Wildcat’s readings of John Joseph Mathews and Vine Deloria Jr. I argue that the latter demonstrate a “landed reasoning,” rooted in pragmatism in a similar way to Textual Reasoning. Dialogue between the two has the potential to break down unhelpful binaries in discourses about land, peoplehood, and sovereignty.