Viola F. Cordova
1937–2002 · Indigenous Thought · Little-known
Cordova was the first Native American woman to earn a philosophy doctorate in the United States, Jicarilla Apache on her father's side. She gave indigenous American thought its first systematic statement in academic form: a universe made of relationships, where people, animals, mountains and the dead all belong to one moral community. Nothing in it stands alone, and a person is made by the relations he stands in.
Signature
The position Cordova is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Nature
- leans Harmony
- Knowledge
- Tradition / Embodied Cognition
Positions on the 5 axes the sources answer
- Natural Processes
- leans Purposeful (75 on a 0–100 scale from Mechanistic to Purposeful)
- Society
- leans Collectivism (25 on a 0–100 scale from Collectivism to Individualism)
- Order
- leans Horizontal (75 on a 0–100 scale from Vertical to Horizontal)
- Nature of Reality
- leans Unity (25 on a 0–100 scale from Unity to Multiplicity)
- Nature
- leans Harmony (75 on a 0–100 scale from Mastery to Harmony)
15 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Cordova refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Animism
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - Government
- Communal Order
What is your ideal form of government? - Highest Good
- Harmony
What is the highest good? - Good and Evil
- Natural Emergence / Personal Judgment
What is the fundamental nature of good and evil? - Knowledge
- Tradition / Embodied Cognition
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Ethics Basis
- Relational
What is the ultimate basis of ethics? - Agency
- Social Determinism / Compatibilism
What is the nature of human agency and freedom? - Beginning of Things
- Theogonic Origin
What is the origin of reality? - Time
- Cyclical Return / Ancestral Time
What is the fundamental shape of time? - Death
- Ancestral Presence
What happens at death? - Primary Bond
- Place / Ancestors
What is your primary bond and loyalty?