Kin Relationality and Ecological Belonging: An Indigenous Perspective on Transcendence

The current international working designation of Indigenous Peoples characterizes these identities as having endured historical colonization and invasion of their Lands (Martinez Cobo, 1981) and extraction and exploitation of their natural resources – air, water bodies (from ice to oceans), mountains and forests, and all that lives in them (United Nations, 2013). Despite these circumstances and the growing threats of the climate emergency, the world’s five thousand Indigenous cultures have formed a resilient political coalition against human and environmental rights violations. Although Indigenous individual and collective rights have only recently been acknowledged in 2007 (United Nations, 2007), Indigenous cross-cultural accord has allowed the emergence of an influential relational identity in a global community beyond just a political one (Wildcat and Voth, 2023). These identities manifest in Indigenous psychologies distinct to each Nation, which can be understood within a framework of Indigenous relationality (Tynan, 2021; Wildcat and Voth, 2023).

My inquiry seeks to understand the forms of Indigenous relationality as models of self-transcendent emotions. I do so from the perspective of Indigenous sciences and the broader thesis that I have begun to chart in the “ethics of belonging” (Celidwen, 2020a,b,c). The ethics of belonging differ from the Western view of homo economicus—or economic human—which assumes that the natural state of humans is competitive, transactional, narrowly selfish, and oriented toward maximizing individual pleasure (Rittenberg and Tregarthen, 2013). Within the ethics of belonging framework, two foundational concepts are germane to a new look at human prosociality: kin relationality and ecological belonging.

One might consider these two Indigenous constructs constituting a prosocial dimension of human nature organized by assumptions concerning human emotion, cognition, motivation, and action oriented toward collectivism and self-transcendence. In my Indigenous Maya Tseltal language, this dimension of humanity can be called ch’ul jkanan “steward of the sacred” or Kanan k’inalat “protector of Mother Earth.” In Latin, it can be homo reverens or “reverential human.”

I ground this work committed to epistemological equity. By this, I mean considering Indigenous and Western ways of knowing based on scientific inquiry, with systematic methods of gathering evidence and assessing beliefs about social and physical reality. Both forms of knowing constitute science within culturally specific practices of rigorous observation, analysis, and evaluation that encourage and advance learning, discovery, and comprehension of the world. Scholars in different disciplines have observed these ways of knowing emerge from context- and culturally-specific interests and concerns (Medin et al., 2013; Larsen et al., 2017; Bang et al., 2018; Gone, 2021; Celidwen, 2023).

Western science epistemology is instantiated in formal theories, hypotheses, and testing oriented toward falsification and universalization. Critiques of this learning method center upon the tendency of Western science toward essentialism and its problematic assumptions that what is learned is value- and culture-free (Bang et al., 2018). In Indigenous sciences, on the other hand, systematic understanding is often arrived at through contextual narratives of the self and the collective and symbolic, mythic relationships and imagination. These practices draw upon multi-generational experiences of “deep spatial” traditional ecological knowledge of landscapes and seascapes (Wildcat, 2013). They center on what Tuck and MacKenzie call relational validity: prioritizing place in a contextual interconnectedness of human life to Lands and all other living beings (Tuck and McKenzie, 2015). Accordingly, Indigenous sciences center these relationships in contexts of cosmologies and sovereignty. Thus, colonialism and its continuous devastating effects on shaping knowledge, cultural identities, and relationships are reckoned as annihilating disturbances of identity.

Thus, this essay bridges multiple forms of empirical evidence, from the cultural and ethnographic to the neurophysiological. In considering these different disciplines, here I center on (1) the deep cultural study of the role of kin relationality and ecological belonging within the world’s Indigenous sciences and their breadth of critical place inquiry and (2) recent advances in the study of self-transcendent states—compassion, gratitude, and awe—through cultural evolution. This inquiry presents a first cultural understanding of kin relationality and ecological belonging.

In this work, I will discuss in greater detail what kin relationality and ecological belonging entail. In considering these two concepts, I offer a dialogue with Western conceptions of transcendence, focusing on how kin relationality and ecological belonging transform the self-transcendent states of compassion, gratitude, and awe and the scope of the transcendent experience to which these states can lead. I then consider the convergence in Indigenous sciences and recent theorizing about cultural evolution concerning how stories, rituals, and ceremonies promote cultivating the ethics of belonging through transcendent states. I close with a consideration of how the ethics of belonging might shape a next chapter in how transcendence is perceived in religious studies.