Antagonistic Abstractions an Ethic in And of Place

Antagonistic Abstractions: An Ethic In and Of Place A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for graduation with Honors in Philosophy. 2020 ________________________ ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ iv Abstract ............................................................................................................................... v Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 On Thin Ice: Moral Obligations to a Vulnerable Culture ................................................... 8 Climate Change as a Lens to Cosmopolitanism ............................................................. 8 Climigration: The Alaskan Context .............................................................................. 12 Culture: From the Ground Up ....................................................................................... 18 Cultural Fragility and the Danger of Diaspora ............................................................. 20 Displaced in Place: The Fourth World.......................................................................... 25 Additional Obligations .................................................................................................. 29 The Cosmopolitan Argument for the Prioritization of Particulars................................ 31 Indigenous Offerings: A Grounded Morality ............................................................... 33 Relationality before Rationality: Judith Butler’s Ethic................................................. 37 Practical Applications ................................................................................................... 40 Conclusion: Strength within Vulnerability ................................................................... 42 Dog Mushing Dynamics: The Ethics and Offerings of a Place-Based Practice ............... 44 The Dog Mushing Debate ............................................................................................. 44 Partial Persons: Western Conceptions of Animal Rights ............................................. 49 “So Like Us:” A Dysfunctional Approach.................................................................... 53 Positional Personal: Indigenous Perspectives on Animals ........................................... 56 Interrelational Ethics: Respectful Use .......................................................................... 58 Positional Personhood................................................................................................... 64 Diversity of Dignity: Animal Interests and Treatment ................................................. 69 Born to Run: Sled Dog Function and Flourishing ........................................................ 73 Bibliography ..................................................................................................................... 80 iii Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to thank the Philosophy Department. What makes Whitman so amazing is the opportunity to work closely with professors and I am fortunate that both my Soper and thesis allowed me to do so. I am indebted to you all for the effort that went into helping me pursue my academic goals. I would also like to thank my friends, teammates and housemates for being the best support system I could imagine. Thank you for all the long conversations, moral support, runs and laughs. Thank you always being there to talk, read paper drafts and, most importantly, offer unwavering support and much-needed advice. iv Abstract This thesis is comprised of two chapters. While each addresses a different ethical issue, the two are connected by the theme of Alaska. In the first chapter, “On Thin Ice: Moral Obligations to a Vulnerable Culture,” I explore ethical obligations toward vulnerable Indigenous climigrants. I argue that their fundamental cultural connection to the land, combined with a history of colonial oppression, bestows us with additional obligations toward this population. My second chapter, “Dog Mushing Dynamics: The Ethics and Offerings of a Place Based Practice,” centers around animal rights organizations’ critique dog mushing. I ultimately argue that dog mushing is not only ethical but, because it comes from the Indigenous framework, offers a way of rethinking our relationships with animals for the better. v Introduction My thesis explores two contemporary issues in Alaska: the impacts of climate change on vulnerable Indigenous communities and the campaign by animal rights organizations against the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. The work is divided into two chapters, with one corresponding to each topic. The first chapter is entitled “On Thin Ice: Moral Obligations to a Vulnerable Culture,” and the second, “Dog Mushing Dynamics: The Ethics and Offerings of a Place-Based Practice.” As each chapter discusses Alaska Native peoples and practices, the sustained goal of my thesis is to draw from both Indigenous and Western philosophical frameworks. Examining ethical issues through a multi-presuppositional approach is a relevant because neither topic has been widely addressed within Western philosophy. As an Alaskan, however, I have encountered both issues firsthand—the force of such experiences led to this thesis, which has allowed me to combine my academic and personal interests. The two chapters do not explicitly build upon one another, but there are important connections. On the most basic level, the work is connected by the recurring theme of Alaska. Taking different approaches, both chapters center around ethics as connected to place. In an inversion of an a priori ethical framework, context, including place and culture, is central to my examination of ethical problems. To that end, my overarching claim is that philosophy should move away from its myopic focus on rationality and abstract mental abilities. Instead, any ethical framework, even—or perhaps especially—a universal framework, should account for other aspects of beings (both human and nonhuman), such as interrelationality and physical context, or place. To make this argument, I use a sustained a conceptual vocabulary, both explicitly and implicitly, throughout the piece. I highlight particularly important terms and concepts after providing an overview of each chapter. Chapter 1 The broad guiding question of the first chapter is: What is the importance of place for human beings? In this section, I examine how the Indigenous culture is intrinsically connected to place. I do so through the lens of climate change forced relocation, a phenomenon termed “climigration.” Unfortunately, Alaska Native communities are particularly vulnerable to climigration due to their cultural connection to place. However, current U.S. policy, which is grounded in a cultural framework that does not emphasize (and in fact devalues) place, is inadequate for protecting Indigenous populations. I argue that the threat of cultural loss Indigenous groups face as a result of displacement, combined with their history of oppression, requires that we recognize additional obligations toward Alaska Native communities. I make this argument on two levels. The first is that the culture should be preserved for its own sake. But, as if the culture’s intense vulnerability was not reason enough to amend policy to protect them, there is an argument on a different scale. From a cosmopolitan perspective, we have a moral obligation to prevent cultural loss not only for the sake of Alaska Native groups but for the good of the global community itself. Alaska Native communities should be protected for the insights their unique worldview brings to global conversations. For instance, the Indigenous understanding of place (apparent in both their epistemology and ethics), can help Western cultures improve our relationship with the environment. In turn, this can 2 provide Western frameworks with better solutions for responding to climate change—so long as we are open to learning from other values. Chapter 2 A central connection between my chapters is that the second chapter is an application of the cosmopolitan argument of my first chapter. Building upon my claim in the first chapter that the Indigenous perspective can help us rethink our own worldview, in this chapter I turn to a particular practice: dog mushing. I contrast Western and Indigenous understandings of animals by examining the ethics and offerings of the musher-dog relationship. Because it comes from an alternate framework, mushing reveals a radically different way of relating to animals. This causes discomfort; Western animal rights organizations, in particular People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), criticize dog mushing for its cruelty. In light of this critique, my guiding questions are: How should we treat animals? Is mushing (or any working relationship with animals) inherently cruel? Ultimately, I argue that PETA’s critique is hypocritical. Their understanding of animals is not neutral or universal but comes from a particular cultural perspective—a framework which, as I will develop, comes with its own baggage and flaws in thinking about animals. Dog mushing seems cruel from the Western perspective, but, as a cosmopolitan would point out, this raises questions about who gets to decide how we treat animals. For several reasons, the Indigenous understanding of animals, of which dog mushing is exemplary, can improve upon the Western view. Thus, I argue, the practice is not only ethical but is in fact a superior interspecies relationship to pet keeping. 3 Cosmopolitanism A sustained goal of this work is to disrupt preconceived Western assumptions, including presuppositions I myself held. In placing the Western and Indigenous worldviews side-by-side and revealing deficiencies within the Western framework, I attempt to embody the cosmopolitan practice of cross-cultural conversation. Cosmopolitanism is a perspective which can be explained, in the way Kwame Anthony Appiah does, through the formula “universality plus difference.”1 From a cosmopolitan perspective, cross-cultural conversations are vital because they give us the opportunity to define the best set of practices. In this way, discussions about values with people who hold different assumptions, instead of keeping us apart, have the potential to create a more unified world. By engaging in a presuppositional exploration of Western and Indigenous values, I attempt to show that much of what we take for granted about the world—for example, that pet dogs live better lives than working dogs or that place is nonessential to culture— we find intuitive because our worldview has not been challenged. Importantly, it is not because our worldview is a reflection of a universal truth to which only our culture has access. Our assumptions are not, to quote Martha Nussbaum, “‘normal and ‘natural’ for the human species as such,” but come from a particular cultural perspective.2 In turning to the Indigenous point of view, I explore the ways in which their worldview can offer ways of rethinking our own and filling in where our framework falls short. 1 Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, First ed. Issues of Our Time (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006), 151. 2 Martha Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” Boston Review. October 1, 1994. 4 Interrelationality A fundamental difference between Indigenous and Western cultures is that the former hold an interrelational worldview. Indigenous groups define the individual not in isolation or as a disembodied Cartesian mind but instead in relation to others and the world in which she lives. This worldview initiated out of a constellation of shared practices; historically, cohesion was necessary for survival because, due to the difficulty of survival, harsh climates render autonomy impossible. Though rejected by thinkers such as Immanuel Kant (whose emphasis on autonomy still heavily influences Western ethics), interrelationality is gaining popularity even within Western philosophy. The perspective is perhaps most prevalent in feminist thinking, such as in the work of Judith Butler. An argument in favor of a relational framework is that defining individuals in terms of their relationships better reflects lived experience. That is, people do not exist as discrete Cartesian minds or Kantian autonomies. Instead, individuals approach the world from a particular social and physical context, which thereby shapes an ethic from out of lived practices. The metaphysical claim that an individual’s identity is created in relation to the other has important implications for ethics. Somewhat confusingly, use and respect are not mutually exclusive under the terms of an interrelational framework. Instead, when all beings are understood as parts of a whole rather than discrete, individual wills, respect does not require granting complete autonomy. As I show in my second chapter, this allows for different types of use, which drastically alters the types of relationships with animals that are considered ethical. Interestingly, there is a way in which the interrelational Indigenous framework—despite its acceptance of use—actually respects 5 animals more. Because the relevant aspect of the individual (rational or irrational) is her embeddedness in a social context, a being does not need to be capable of particular mental functions to be considered worthy of respect. This provides a way to respect animals on their own unique terms rather than due to their likeness to traits specific to the human being. Place As a result of Western philosophy’s emphasis on the intellectual over the physical, place is understood as secondary or nonessential to the individual. It is therefore not considered relevant to the culture. In fact, much of Western culture is driven by a desire to separate the human being from her environment, an effort to eliminate embodied vulnerability and emulate the Platonic freeing of mind from body. In his cosmopolitan treatise “To Eternal Peace,” Kant exemplifies the Western understanding of the relationship between place and culture.3 Kant posits that nature created difference in order to populate the globe. The idea is that, by introducing cultural difference, groups will spread out to different locations on the spherical earth. Importantly, Kant believes that culture precedes place. However, this is not the case for Indigenous cultures, whose entire worldview is built around place. According to Indigenous philosophy, epistemology and ethics are grounded in lived experience. Knowledge and morality are 3 “Nature’s provisional arrangement consists in the following: she has seen to it that human beings can live in all the regions where they are settled; she has driven them everywhere, even into the most inhospitable regions, in order to populate them; she has forced them by war to enter into more or less legal relationships.” Immanuel Kant, “To Eternal Peace” from The Basic Writings of Kant. Modern Library Pbk. Ed. Modern Library Classics. New York: Modern Library, 2001, 451. 6 not uncovered—there are no transcendent truths or moral imperatives—but instead are created relationally through our interactions with the world and human and non-human entities around us. In this way, place is so vital to the Indigenous worldview that the culture may be unable to exist apart from the land. 7 On Thin Ice: Moral Obligations to a Vulnerable Culture A fundamental difference between our culture and Eskimo culture…is that we have irrevocably separated ourselves from the world that animals occupy. We have turned all animals and elements of the natural world into objects. We manipulate them to serve the complicated ends of our destiny. Eskimos do not grasp this separation easily, and have difficulty imagining themselves entirely removed from the world of animals. For many of them, to make this separation is analogous to cutting oneself off from light or water. It is hard to imagine how to do it. –Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams Climate Change as a Lens to Cosmopolitanism In his essay “To Eternal Peace,” Immanuel Kant emphasizes a shared globe, that, due to its spherical shape, makes it impossible to force the other off the edge of the earth. The globe inevitably puts individuals in contact with one another. Kant believes human beings have two options for negotiating our inescapable relationality: we can either learn to work with difference, or, if we fail to do so, peace will occur “upon the graveyard of the human race.”4 Though Kant was writing over a century before climate change was recognized as a major ecological and social issue, his words eerily apply to what is arguably the largest global challenge facing humanity today. By transcending political boundaries and threatening both the environment and the global community, climate change forces human beings to acknowledge the ways our societies are both physically and socially vulnerable. As Chie Sakakibara puts it, “Climate change in the Arctic informs us of the essential interconnection of the climate, 4 Kant’s title has a double meaning. The first is that human beings will successfully achieve lasting peace, while the second is decidedly less optimistic; the other way human beings will achieve eternal peace is through a war that ultimately terminates the entire species. Kant, “To Eternal Peace,” 439. 8 weather, and society.”5 Extreme weather events and rising sea levels have created a new form of refugee, an individual displaced not by society but by nature: the climigrant.6 In highlighting the social aspect of environmental issues, climigration serves as a through line between climate change and cosmopolitanism. The cosmopolitanism perspective dictates that all human beings belong to a single moral community. Our allegiance is to humanity as a whole; the fact of sharing a globe, rather than morally convenient groupings such as nationality and ethnicity, serves as the basis of our obligations. Yet despite what we fundamentally share, difference is equally important for the cosmopolitan. In his book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, Kwame Anthony Appiah explains cosmopolitanism through the formula “universality plus difference.”7 Difference is important for Appiah because he believes that, while a universal truth exists, it is a practical, lived truth. Each culture has access to a different aspect of the truth, meaning a different insight into the way the world works. Cultural diversity is important because a plurality of ways of life are necessary for both determining the best practices and for a comprehensive understanding of the world. Climate change is a cosmopolitan matter because it brings individuals and countries from across the globe together to navigate an internationally shared issue. The impacts of pollution do not adhere to socially constructed borders. The United States will not be the only location to experience the effects of its fossil fuel contributions; in fact, 5 Chie Sakakibara, “Climate Change and Cultural Survival in the Arctic: People of the Whales and Muktuk Politics,” Weather, Climate and Society 3, no. 2 (April 2011): 86. 6 A 2009 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted that 150 million people would be displaced by 2050, primarily due to erosion, flooding and sea level rise. John Vidal, “Global Warming Could Create 150 million ‘Climate Refugees’ by 2050,” The Guardian, November 2, 2009, accessed June 26, 2019. 7 Appiah, 151. 9 our pollution will likely be felt more severely elsewhere. And, because we created the pollution that is disrupting lives across the world, we are arguably responsible for these invisible others. Moreover, although it is ecologically a transnational problem, what climate change means will differ from group to group, disproportionately impacting those who are already vulnerable due to the consequences of colonization. In this paper, I explore our ethical obligations toward one such population: Indigenous Alaskan communities. The Alaska Native culture is endangered both because of its history of oppression, which began with Russian explorers in the 1700s, and because their way of life is so intrinsically connected to place that separation from the land is, in the words of Barry Lopez, “analogous to cutting oneself off from light or water.”8 This ethical conundrum leads to the central questions of my paper: Should the U.S. government prioritize the preservation of Indigenous communities in decisions regarding funding allocations, even if doing so does not make monetary sense? From an ethical perspective, as a result of their history of colonization and uniquely fundamental ties to the land, do we have additional moral obligations toward Indigenous climigrants? To address these questions, I first provide an overview of current climate change policy and the challenges climigration poses to Western frameworks. In particular, I argue, by utilizing cost-benefit analyses (which do not account for the importance of place for cultural practices) the U.S. government fails to adequately protect Alaska Native communities. Ultimately, policy is inadequate because it is grounded in the Western framework, which does not understand physical location to be imperative for either the individual or the culture. For Indigenous cultures, however, place is not 8 Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (New York, N.Y.: Bantam, 1987), 180. 10 secondary but the very starting point of the way of life. Some forms of climigration would remove peoples from their cultural foundation and thus could effectively be cultural genocide. This possibility is dangerous for both the way of life and for the individual because, as situations of cultural discontinuity such as diaspora reveal, culture is intimately connected to individual identity. The second basis of obligation toward Indigenous Alaskans is that the dangers of cultural loss and diaspora are not merely theoretical claims. Manifest Destiny justified Western expansion and, with it, the assimilation of Indigenous peoples who were believed to require European intervention. Today, the Indigenous way of life exists only tenuously in Alaska and elsewhere in part because Westerners attempted to annihilate the culture. The theft of languages, practices and traditions was a catastrophe from which the way of life has not fully recovered and from which it is unlikely to ever recover. Hundreds of years of colonization and systemic oppression have led to historical trauma and pervasive mental health issues, which further stigmatize the population.9 I argue that the United States government’s complicity in creating the culture’s vulnerability conveys further obligations to protect Indigenous communities. The United States’ colonial past and its current climate change policies are not two distinct phenomena: to ignore the importance of place for Indigenous peoples would result in assimilation and thus would be a continuation of colonization. From a cosmopolitan perspective, this is dangerous because the loss of a way of life does not only impact that particular group. The extinction of a culture also means the loss of the unique worldview and its contribution to cross-cultural conversations. For a 9 Helen Epstein, “The Highest Suicide Rate in the World,” The New York Review of Books, October 19, 2019. 11 cosmopolitan, the potential loss of a lived experience strengthens our obligation to prioritize the protection of these climigrants for what their belief system could teach us. This is a particularly pertinent point because Indigenous groups could help Western cultures rethink our relationship with the environment. In turn, this may provide more sustainable solutions for climate change. Framed in this way, the loss of a culture is detrimental on not only an individual or group level; it potentially weakens the entire global community and threatens the future of humanity itself. Climigration: The Alaskan Context Geographically, northern latitudes are disproportionately impacted by climate change. Northern regions are warming nearly twice as quickly as other parts of the globe, an anomaly known as “polar amplification.”10 In Alaska, the warming ocean and melting permafrost are causing widespread erosion along the coast. And, ironically given that they contributed very little to the problem, Alaska Native communities are experiencing some of the harshest effects of climate change. According to a 2009 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, over 30 Alaska Native villages face an “imminent” threat of erosion. For many coastal Alaskan communities, climate change is not a theoretical future problem but a very real issue.11 The term “climigrant” was coined in reference to these vulnerable Alaskan residents. 10 Elizabeth Marino, Fierce Climate, Sacred Ground: An Ethnography of Climate Change in Shishmaref, Alaska (Fairbanks, Alaska: University of Alaska Press, 2015), 32. 11 Merrit Kennedy, “Threatened by Rising Seas, Alaska Village Decides to Relocate.” National Public Radio. Washington, D.C: NPR, August 2016, , accessed June 26, 2019. 12 Towns threatened by climate change within the United States currently have three options: rebuilding in the same location, collocating (moving individually to integrate into an existing community), and relocating (moving together to a new, uninhabited site). Each option has its benefits and disadvantages. Rebuilding is currently the only practice for which communities can receive full federal funding, but it is ultimately both economically and physically impractical.12 Collocation is less expensive than relocation. However, in Alaska it would mean moving residents from the remote coastal villages of, to name a few, Shishmaref, Kivalina and Newtok, into urban cities such as Anchorage. Communities would be separated and, extracted from the land, individuals would be unable to engage in the place-based practices, including subsistence hunting and gathering, which maintain the culture and affirm personal identity. Relocation is both emotionally and monetarily costly. However, it is ultimately the option most residents prefer because, by keeping communities intact and in a culturally relevant location, relocation allows for the continuity of two central Indigenous values: community and place. The majority of threatened Alaskan towns recognize that remaining in their current location is unsustainable. For perspective, one family in the small Northwestern village of Shishmaref reported moving 13 times in the past 15 years; the town has voted to relocate together to a chosen site.13 However, neither Shishmaref nor any other Alaskan towns’ plans have come to fruition because the federal government lacks the 12 In 2006 new seawall was constructed in Kivalina, a small town near the Chukchi Sea. Federal leaders visited the community to celebrate the finalization of the multi-million-dollar construction. However, the day before the celebration ceremony, a storm critically damaged the wall. Such situations suggest that current methods for climate change adaptation are inadequate. Robin Bronen, “Climate-Induced Displacement of Alaska Native Communities,” Brookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement, 2013. 13 Kennedy. 13 capacity to fully address climate change. As background, funding for environmental disasters is administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, under the Stafford Act. However, the Stafford Act does not allocate money for gradual catastrophes. This includes erosion, the greatest threat facing Alaska’s coastal communities. Nor is there funding available for preemptive measures; towns are only eligible for funding after a disaster. This makes communities even more vulnerable when storms hit because they are unable to take preemptive measures to offset catastrophic levels of flooding and land loss. The act of permanently leaving one’s home after climate change has rendered the location uninhabitable is referred to as “climigration.” Both collocation and relocation are forms of climigration, which Matthews and Potts posit is the end point of climate change adaptation.14 They write, “Abandoning a community…is not an act of adaptation because it does not manage climate change impacts; rather, it concedes to them.” According to the Western framework, the goal of society is to abstract person from place—this is what we refer to as civilization. The separation Lopez describes in the epigraph take place through infrastructure. However, when we manipulate and objectify nature, we delude ourselves into believing we are no longer dependent upon the landscape. Conceding to the power of the environment thus requires recognizing our embodied dependence; the very vulnerability our culture attempts to deny. The U.S. government’s resistance to recognizing—much less accepting—place-based vulnerability is reflected in the current presidential administration’s exchange of the phrases “climate change” and “climate 14 Tony Matthews and Ruth Potts “Planning for climigration: a framework for effective action” Climatic Change 148, no. 4 (April 2018): 611. 14 change adaptation” with “extreme weather event” and “resilience.”15 When framed in the way Western societies understand their relationship with nature (as a battle between human beings and the environment) climigration, a “form of forced migration [which] occurs in response to threats to lives or livelihoods connected to climate change impacts,” is the equivalent of acknowledging that this is a conflict that human beings ultimately cannot win.16 Since they are limited to rebuilding, current policies can be understood as fighting vulnerability to nature by reestablishing the human’s will over her surroundings in the name of progress and civilization. Admitting defeat is difficult for a culture that takes pride in its ability to overpower, manipulate and control, so climigration poses not only practical but ideological challenges to U.S. governmental frameworks. A further problem for climigrants, Indigenous or not, is that they do not fit neatly into any current legal definitions of displaced groups. Without a definitive status, it is unclear what rights climigrants should be entitled to. Some want to expand the definition of environmental refugee so that individuals uprooted by climate change will have access to the same protections as those displaced by political circumstances. Yet attorney Robin Bronen, who coined the term “climigrant,” believes it is inappropriate to include climigrants under the definition of refugee. She writes, “Human rights protections thus attach to refugee movements because of the nation state government’s failure to protect its citizens. In comparison, the international community should expect that nation state governments would want to protect their citizenry from climate-induced ecological 15 Bill McKibben, “The Trump Administration’s Solution to Climate Change: Ban the Term,” The Guardian, August 8, 2017. 16 Matthews and Potts, 609. 15 changes.”17 Because the majority of climigrants move internally within a nation-state, Bronen argues they do not need international protection; climigrants need their own countries to protect them. Considering their historical failure to protect and respect Indigenous cultures, Bronen’s point is especially true of the U.S. Government’s responsibility for Alaska Native climigrants. With this in mind, climate change could, ironically enough, provide an opportunity for the U.S. to begin to amend past injustices done to the population. Yet much like the president’s administrative stance on climate change, the United States’ current method for handling climigration has been, in effect, to ignore the problem. Under current legislation, no federal agency has the power to move an entire community, no single governmental organization can address communities’ strategic planning needs, and no funding is available specifically for relocation.18 When villages do apply for grants for constructing and rebuilding infrastructure, agencies use impartial cost-benefit analyses to determine project viability. In doing so, they avoid having to register the heightened vulnerability of small Indigenous communities such as the aforementioned Kivalina, Shishmaref and Newtok. Even more problematically, due to the high expense of transporting supplies to rural areas, cost-benefit analyses favor more accessible and populated areas such as New York, New Jersey and Florida.19 Indigenous 17 Bronen, “Climate-Induced Community Relocations: Creating an Adaptive Governance Framework Based in Human Rights Doctrine,” New York University Review of Law & Social Change (2011): 395. 18 Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana was the first U.S. community to receive full federal funding to relocate. In 2016, the town, which is comprised of mostly Indigenous residents, received a $48 million grant through the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s National Disaster Resilience Competition. After 16 years of pushing for relocation, the town is currently entering phase three of the moving process; in January of 2019 the State of Louisiana purchased land for the resettlement site. “Isle de Jean Charles Resettlement Project,” , accessed June 24, 2019. 19 Ibid. 16 communities are disadvantaged by a system in which “...attachment to nature, whether spiritual or otherwise, has no greater a priori ethical weight than the preference for a bigger ski area, or a faster snowmobile ride.”20 In practice, a rational framework is utilitarian: the amount of money the government is willing to spend on a community, and thus the lengths it is willing to take to preserve that community, is directly proportional to population size. A rational framework is also objective; it makes decisions entirely based on the number of residents rather than considering factors such as culture or attachment to the land. Therefore, according to the calculations of federal agencies, preserving New York City takes precedence over saving Newtok (population 3,000), because the city is much larger. The rationale is that it objectively makes better sense to move the residents of Newtok to Anchorage than to put more money into relocating a small community. Protecting Newtok may seem like a high cost-low reward situation, yet the outcome shifts significantly when one accounts for the cruciality of place for the Indigenous way of life and identity. In the meantime, the absence of governmental action forces many rural Alaskan residents to move to larger towns. The detachment from place results in the dissolution of the community and diaspora. Since Indigenous frameworks define a human being in terms of her relationships (a worldview I will discuss further) cultural loss and social isolation are already very real threats.21 To compound the issue, the individuals who move are those with the ability and resources to do so; the most vulnerable groups, such as the elderly and poor, have no choice but to remain. Unfortunately, the government’s 20 Sarah Krakoff “American Indians, Climate Change, and Ethics for a Warming World,” University of Colorado Law Review 78 (September 2008), 28. 21 Michael Anthony Hart, “Indigenous Worldviews, Knowledge, and Research: The Development of an Indigenous Research Paradigm, Journal of Indigenous Voices in Social Work, 1, no. 1 (2010). 17 lack of action results in further inequality and risk of harm among the most acutely vulnerable subset of an already endangered population. Culture: From the Ground Up To comprehend why applying utilitarian cost-benefit analyses to Indigenous communities is problematic, the first step is to understand how the Indigenous understanding of place differs from the Western. As a brief overview, Western philosophy has a long tradition of distinguishing between the mind and body and prioritizing the former. According to Western philosophers such as Plato, the only way to achieve knowledge is by distancing oneself from one’s body and physical surroundings. By virtue of our capacity to reason, we are encouraged to overcome both our bodies and the world around us. As a result, the body, and its particular social and environmental context, are understood as nonessential to the individual. This leads to a conception of the human being as autonomous and therefore extractible from her community and surroundings: this is the perspective from which U.S. policies are created. Problems arise when applying this framework to Alaska Native climigrants, however, because Indigenous cultures have a radically different understanding of the importance of place to the human being. In an inversion of the Platonic belief that embodiment detracts from one’s ability to know, to live a meaningful life according to Indigenous epistemology requires engaging with the world we are dependent upon. Indigenous mythology provides an amusing analogy highlighting the importance of place-based practical knowledge for Indigenous cultures. In myths, Coyote often represents a figure akin to the Platonic 18 philosopher, an individual who, in his pursuit of knowledge, forgets about the world around him. Yet instead of being regarded as the paradigm of enlightenment, Coyote is portrayed as a fool.22 Although he may be academically wise, Coyote lacks the practical knowledge Indigenous peoples believe to be of greater value. The portrayal of Coyote points toward the fact that, according to Indigenous epistemology and ethics, knowledge and morality are not abstracted from the physical world. As Brian Yazzie Burkhart explains, “Knowledge is not a thing in the world that we can discover. Knowledge is not such that if we just peer into the world long enough or just sit and think long enough, it will come to us in all its unabated glory. Knowledge is shaped and guided by human actions, endeavors, desires and goals.”23 Knowledge and morality do not transcend human beings and thus cannot be uncovered, either in the natural world or in the intellectual. Instead we create them through our interactions with other beings (both human and non-human) and with the environment. This is a radically different understanding of the human being: our role is not to pursue enlightenment or to discover meaning by extracting ourselves from the world around us, but instead to “find understanding through [our connections].”24 Since knowledge is not abstracted from the world but instead is created through practical, lived experience, place is not an irrelevant byproduct of the unfortunate (bodily) aspect of the human being as it is under Western frameworks. Krakoff explains that, for Indigenous groups, nature is not something to be overcome or conquered but the very foundation of 22 Brian Yazzie Burkart, “What Coyote and Thales can Teach Us: An Outline of American Indian Epistemology,” from American Indian Thought: Philosophical Essay, (Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 21. 23 Ibid, 21. 24 Ibid, 25. 19 the belief system and identity, which will have important implications for their ethics. As Krakoff writes, “…the place itself is sacred, and therefore the starting point for the system of beliefs and ethics that generate from it…”25 Because place, rather than the human mind, is central to both humanity and culture, people are inseparable from their environment, a connection which Western frameworks do not (and cannot) register. Dangerously, climigration—particularly collocation—would extract Indigenous peoples from their cultural foundation. Since the way of life is built upon the land, the culture is in many ways dependent upon place. Collocation could therefore have uniquely grave implications for Alaska Native peoples. Cultural Fragility and the Danger of Diaspora On the scale of the individual, cultural practice is important because it informs nearly every aspect of identity. Seemingly mundane activities such as speaking a particular language and eating traditional foods play a pivotal role in shaping and affirming an individual’s identity and even her humanity. Despite the continuous denial of their way of life in a world becoming increasingly Western in its reliance on technology, Indigenous peoples have thus far managed to maintain themselves as a distinct group. Their successful cultural continuity has, in large part, been attributed to sustained engagement in cultural practices such as subsistence hunting. However, the Indigenous way of life hinges upon access to the land, a proximity which is now at stake. Even though Alaska Native climigrants in larger cities would not be displaced in the same way that refugees are—meaning that they would not lack governmental 25 Krakoff, 5. 20 protection—they would be placeless insofar as their lived experience would not correspond to a cultural belief system bound to the landscape. Social belonging proves more important for human well-being than political protection, wherein human rights are conferred on the abstract bases of rationality and dignity rather than interconnectivity and place. Although relocation and collocation are both incredibly disruptive, collocation poses a particular threat to Indigenous peoples because it removes people from their cultural physical context. Interestingly enough, insight into the vitality of place for the Alaska Native people is apparent in the way they have maintained their distinct way of life despite the introduction of Western tools and frameworks. Indigenous Alaskans have integrated technology into many traditional practices. For instance, subsistence hunting, perhaps more than any other practice, is what allows Alaska Native peoples to remain connected to their culture. As one individual explains, teaching her son to seal hunt serves as “...his way of grounding himself, [of] connecting to the Inupiat who hunted the waters of the Norton Sound for millenniums. His way of knowing where he comes from.”26 Even though most Indigenous Alaskans use guns, boats and snowmachines, this approach works because what is imperative is the practice of the hunt rather than the actual act of killing. As Lopez puts it, “Hunting…is a state of mind. All one’s faculties are brought to bear in an effort to become fully incorporated into the landscape.”27 As Lopez suggests, hunting is not so much about physical survival as it is about cultural continuity. The practice encapsulates many traditional values, including sharing and a connected reciprocity with the land and animals. And, despite evolving approaches to the 26 27 Laureli Ivanoff, “The Bearded Seal My Son May Never Hunt,” The New York Times, October 19, 2018. Lopez,179. 21 ritual, the interaction with the land and other creatures has fundamentally remained the same. As I will argue in the second chapter, the same point can be made about dog mushing. But one cannot achieve the experience of hunting without what is now in jeopardy; namely, the landscape and animals. Without the ability to live a way of life continuous with their belief system, Indigenous peoples would not be able to maintain the culture or a cohesive sense of identity. Kawagley critiques the idea that Indigenous groups can simply be integrated into pre-existing communities. He writes, “From a scientific isolationist perspective, the [Alaska] Native people are considered transmutable physical elements of the environment and objects that can be removed to a new village site, where they often become ‘human animals in a cultural zoo.’”28 The “scientific isolationist” point of view is the perspective from which Western frameworks are built. Such frameworks understand place as irrelevant and the individual as autonomous rather than part of a greater social and ecological relational whole. However, as stated earlier, the Indigenous culture is built around place in a way that makes cultural continuity through shared practices impossible when displaced. Traditional knowledge is rendered irrelevant without the practices coinciding with that knowledge. Those who still remember the traditional way of life will be unable to pass down the information in a way that makes sense to younger generations who have no point of reference or need for the knowledge. What was once practical and lived becomes abstract and theoretical, creating a generational divide in which arctic ingenuity—an intimate knowledge of animal migration and weather patterns developed over the past thousands of years—will be lost. To ignore the importance of place for the 28 Kawagley, 89. 22 Indigenous culture would result in assimilation and, effectively, cultural genocide. When framed in this way, climate change policy and colonial imperialism are not distinct phenomena: the two share the failure to recognize the unique connection between the Indigenous way of life and place. Moreover, collocation is perilous because it could result in assimilation and thus the termination of the culture itself. In larger cities, individuals would likely need to assimilate in order to belong in an urban environment or else risk becoming, to reiterate Kawagley’s words, “human animals in a cultural zoo.”29 Assimilation can prove deadly on both cultural and individual levels. When describing her personal experience with placelessness in “We Refugees,” Hannah Arendt makes a connection between diaspora, assimilation and identity loss.30 Arendt explains the loss of a mundane, familiar social context when she writes: “We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gesture, the unaffected expression of feelings.”31 Speaking another language removes true expression since the new language lacks the terms for what the individual feels. Without the ability to express herself or comprehend the world around her, the climigrant, like the refugee, loses the ability to understand herself. For instance, in an effort to “Westernize” Indigenous peoples, groups were forbidden from speaking their native languages. The 29 Ibid, 89. Although Arendt is describing a seemingly dissimilar event—the diaspora of Jewish peoples as a result of the Holocaust—her account is useful in that the psychological impacts of social exclusion and placelessness among the populations are remarkably similar. 31 Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees,” from Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile (San Diego, California: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994), 110. 30 23 loss of language makes it more difficult for individuals to process their feelings and understand their cultural context, which has exacerbated the trauma of colonization. As Arendt explains, the refugee, unable to maintain her familiar way of life, is forced to assimilate in order to have even the semblance of an identity. But this fabricated sense of being and belonging cannot make up for what she lost. Arendt puts it succinctly: “…representing nothing but his own absolutely unique individuality which, deprived of expression and action upon a common world, loses all significance.”32 Assimilation strips an individual of what makes her unique; namely, the potential to live an authentically meaningful life, because she loses the ability to engage in a cultural context she understands, one which offers a shared sense of continuity to her life. Dangerously, significance comes from understanding oneself as an individual with the ability to make a distinct impact on the world, an impact that presupposes cultural connectivity. This feeling derives from belonging not to a political system, but an interrelational context. For example, when separated from the land, Indigenous peoples—despite their political status as U.S. citizens—will be unable to engage in the practices that connect them to their ancestors and therefore to a broader network of meaning and significance. On this point, another problem with collocation is that residents would be dispersed into larger communities and so would no longer comprise a cohesive group. Like the refugees Arendt describes, Indigenous climigrants would lack both cultural community and cultural continuity. They would thereby lose the ability to engage in even those practices that do not involve the land, such as dancing or speaking traditional languages. Unfortunately, the danger of diaspora is particularly heightened for 32 Hannah Arendt, “Decline of the Nation-State; End of the Rights of Man” in The Origins of Totalitarianism, New ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1973), 302. 24 Indigenous groups because they hold a relational worldview. Under this framework, an individual is defined by her connections and the community in which she lives. The community importantly precedes the individual; in an inversion of the Western definition of the human being, people are not autonomies, but parts of a whole.33 This societal arrangement has its roots in bodily vulnerability in the face of mutual dependence for survival. Cohesiveness—between human beings as well as between people and animals—was necessary in harsh climates where autonomy was impossible. As I will address in the second chapter, this unity was particularly strong between human beings and dogs, who formed cohesive units to hunt. While this level of dependence is no longer necessary, even today a fundamental yet fragile relationship exists between an individual and the community she is both formed by and dependent upon. Diaspora is dangerous for individuals who hold an interrelational worldview because, when one’s identity is defined in relation to her community, who is she when extracted from her ties? Problematically, this is a loss that frameworks with presuppositions that emphasize autonomy cannot comprehend. Displaced in Place: The Fourth World The Western framework cannot account for the heightened trauma that comes with the loss of community for a group who understands the human being interrelationally. However, it is undeniable that the absence of a social context can have 33 Michael Anthony Hart, “Indigenous Worldviews, Knowledge, and Research: The Development of an Indigenous Research Paradigm,” Journal of Indigenous Voices in Social Work, Volume 1, Issue No. 1 (2010). 25 perilous effects on the human identity.34 We need not look far for support for this claim: the danger of diaspora is apparent in that Indigenous peoples in the United States are still experiencing mental health issues and historical trauma stemming from colonization. The term the “Fourth World” is used to describe the Indigenous experience of being colonized and displaced despite physically remaining in the same place.35 In a depiction similar to Arendt’s, Kawagley explains the displacement of Alaska Natives. He writes, “In essence, they become emigrants and exiles from their own languages, values, traditions, and homeland. It is difficult to live in two worlds without an adequate bridge between them.”36 Trapped in the chasm between cultures, Indigenous peoples are unable to move forward but cannot return to a traditional way of life. Due to this ideological displacement, many Alaska Natives are stuck grappling with unresolved grief dating back to assimilation that occurred before they were even born. This grief is so persistent in part because of the loss of language and, with it, the ability to understand the aspects of the self that are tied to a broader cultural context. As one individual puts it, “I think we’re all inhibited by the sense of responsibility and the sense of guilt...we blame ourselves for our loss of tradition…I can’t separate myself from the past, the history and the trauma.”37 Mourning manifests in a variety of mental and social problems, such as substance abuse issues and high rates of suicide, which further stigmatize the culture. 34 Indigenous peoples in the United States and Canada have a disproportionately high rate of social problems, including suicide, which research attribute to the impacts of colonization. Emotions were traditionally viewed as dangerous, both for the individual and the group; individuals who feel as if they cannot control their feelings understand themselves as a burden to the community and choose to commit suicide. Epstein. 35 Marino,16. 36 Kawagley, 56. 37 Maria Yellowhorse and Lemyra DeBryun, “American Indian Holocaust: Healing and Historical Unresolved Grief,” American Indian and Alaska Native Mental Health Research 8, no. 2, (1998):72. 26 One hypothesis for why trauma has been particularly pervasive among Indigenous peoples is because Western methods of healing fundamentally conflict with their cultural values.38 In the West, the typical approach for processing emotions involves a patient talking through her feelings with the help of a counselor. However, in order to maintain the fundamental interconnectivity necessary for survival, Indigenous cultures discourage individuality. To instill the notion that people are inseparable the whole, individuals are dissuaded from talking about themselves. Furthermore, emotions in particular were understood as a threat because they can lead to actions that could potentially endanger the entire group. Since displaying emotion was stigmatized, individuals were taught from a young age to repress and hide their feelings. Since it creates a tension with their cultural values, encouraging Indigenous peoples to talk about themselves and their emotions may actually inhibit healing. And even if there was not a conflict between cultural values, as a further obstacle, the English language likely lacks the words corresponding to what the individual is feeling. But, although Western methods of processing may be ineffective, many Indigenous peoples have begun to search within their culture for ways of healing. Importantly, reclaiming traditions and languages provides Alaska Native peoples with a way of connecting with their ancestors and bridging the gap Kawagley describes. For example, one author describes hunting bearded seals as “...a life-giving act of intentional decolonization, our way of keeping alive a simple custom that’s become sacred.”39 Similarly, for Indigenous dog mushers, mushing serves as a means of cultural continuity and a rebuke of Western colonization. By reclaiming once-forbidden 38 39 Epstein. Ivanoff. 27 traditional practices, Indigenous peoples turn what were initially means of survival into cultural symbols. Both because they connect individuals with their ancestors and at the same time reject Western practices (and thereby colonization), these practices serve as healing mechanisms. Culturally relevant methods are effective in a way that Western treatments are not because they are able to get to the root of the problem. At the bottom of many substance use disorders in minority groups is a lack of self-worth that derives from belonging to a culture that is not valued. As Iris Marion Young explains, “Those living under cultural imperialism find themselves defined from the outside, positioned, placed, by a network of dominant meanings they experience as arising from elsewhere, from those with whom they do not identity and who do not identify with them.”40 In terms of Indigenous populations in the United States, this may be the result of peoples’ inability, under a different cultural belief system, to create a shared context of meaning that gives life significance. Engaging in traditional practices allows individuals to “enhance their cultural identity.”41 Therefore, by defining themselves on their own terms, Indigenous peoples are able to separate themselves from the trauma and place themselves into a larger cultural context with belonging and meaning. This, in turn, allows for cultural continuity. However, because many traditional practices fundamentally depend upon the land, climigration could undermine the coping mechanisms that allow Indigenous people to find cultural belonging. 40 Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011), 59. 41 Dickerson et al., 506. 28 Additional Obligations As if Western responsibility for creating the Fourth World were not enough, our obligations become even more concrete when considering that Western society may have caused the literal exposure of Alaska Native villages. In her ethnography of Shishmaref, Elizabeth Marino posits that the community’s intense vulnerability is a result of the social process of cultural imperialism. Historically, Alaska Native tribes were nomadic; Marino explains that mobility functioned as a form of adaptation to environmental catastrophes such as storms and erosion.42 However, during the early 20th century the federal government began constructing buildings, such as a post office and a school, on the small barrier island that would become home to the village of Shishmaref. To return to Young’s quote, groups were not only metaphorically but literally placed from the outside. Infrastructure attached Alaska Native communities to a particular location in a way they were not prior, thereby transforming place into a fixed location. Interestingly enough, this act of physical placing displaced individuals by disconnecting them from the land. Marino writes, “Western infrastructure development was explicitly used by missionaries and US government leaders to promote colonial institutions and to discourage traditional infrastructure, patterns of mobility, and traditional institutions.”43 Infrastructure created an increasing reliance on modern appliances, the use of which has replaced many traditional practices. Decades later, reverting back to the nomadic lifestyle is not a 42 Elizabeth Marino, Fierce Climate Sacred Ground: An Ethnography of Climate Change in Shishmaref, Alaska, (Fairbanks, Alaska: University of Alaska Press, 2015), 50. As Marino explains “The ability to ‘move to higher ground’ is a kind of flexibility that prevented high-water events from becoming flooding disasters.” 43 Marino, 45. 29 realistic option for Alaska Natives. By introducing Indigenous groups to technology, the federal government made Indigenous peoples dependent upon both outside entities and a particular location. Given what we know about the importance of place for Alaska Native cultures as well as the vitality of a cultural context for human well-being, it appears that we do have additional obligations to protect Indigenous climigrants. Our obligations are heightened both in order to compensate for past treatment and to avoid perpetuating colonial displacement. As Marino puts it, “If this Inupiaq Eskimo community [Shishmaref] is the clear victim of climate change, a product of modernity and that very industrialization, then something is terribly wrong and unjust.”44 Despite their responsibility for creating this vulnerability, current policy indicates that the U.S. government is not working to protect these communities. Hypocritically, the government was willing to spend money to “Westernize” this culture, but now refuses to allocate extra funds to protect the way of life. The lack of action and urgency suggests that the government still does not perceive these cultures as worthy of preservation, further solidifying the connection between colonization and climate change policy. To fail to acknowledge that we are responsible twofold for the fragility of communities such as Shishmaref—a lack of recognition which can appear as innocent as attempting to apply a cost-benefit analysis to the loss of a culture—is to devalue both the culture and, as I will argue in the next section, diversity itself. 44 Ibid., 10. 30 The Cosmopolitan Argument for the Prioritization of Particulars While assimilation most directly impacts those individuals left without a social context, Appiah argues it is an affront to all human beings.45 According to Appiah, assimilation is not only a fundamental violation of the cosmopolitan perspective but actually dangerous. When we lose a lived experience, we lose what we, both as individuals and as a global community, could have gained from that culture’s perspective. According to Martha Nussbaum, this is not only a theoretical but a practical issue. She argues that we need to respect and understand other ways of life in order to properly address international problems such as climate change. Nussbaum’s point is especially relevant considering that Indigenous communities could help to mend our relationship with the environment and provide more sustainable approaches to climate change adaptation. While it seems as if achieving universal agreement—a singular global viewpoint—is the goal of cosmopolitan interactions, this could not be further from the truth. From a cosmopolitan standpoint, cultural plurality is important because crosscultural conversations, by drawing from different cultural frameworks, reveal something fundamental about the way the world works. Appiah claims we have a moral responsibility to preserve difference because, on a world level, we have a lot to learn the ways of others, “even from those we disagree with.”46 Central to Appiah’s argument is that a universal truth exists. However, it is a practical, lived truth, and, importantly, no culture has access to it in its entirety. One culture may get it mostly right and yet, because 45 46 Appiah, 165. Appiah, 145-146. 31 we do not know the universal, another group’s insight could still improve upon our own practices. Thus, no culture has all the answers, but all have some to offer. Through crosscultural conversations, we are able to choose the best practices, which is only possible when every voice can be heard. Assimilation—the silencing of viewpoints—is a universal injury because the world does not only lose the culture, but also the unique insight they offer to the global community. Appiah’s claim that we have much to learn from the ways of others is especially relevant when thinking about global problems. As Nussbaum explains, “The air does not obey national boundaries,” and so, no matter how much we may resent this fact, “we live in a world in which the destinies of nations are closely intertwined...”47 Kant is correct: international problems inevitably arise by virtue of our shared and spherical globe; this inevitability necessitates collaboration with others with vastly different ways of life. However, Nussbaum posits that we need more than a scientific or geographical knowledge of other places to navigate our shared destinies. One argument Nussbaum makes in support of a cosmopolitan education is that awareness of difference lays the groundwork for respect and trust for invisible others.48 To successfully collaborate with another culture—an effort which is necessary when grappling with an issue such as climate change—we must understand how others approach the world. And, as Appiah emphasizes, we may learn something valuable from their insight. For example, if we are open to learning from Indigenous cultures, these groups can help us rethink our relationship with place and our obligations to the environment. Given our shared 47 Nussbaum, 9. A cosmopolitan education dictates that we learn not only about our own country and its history, but also about the ways of others across the globe. Nussbaum. 48 32 destinies and the threat of climate change, understanding and respecting the Indigenous way of life is necessary not only for cultural survival, but for the future of humanity itself. For this to occur, however, the U.S. must first accept that its presuppositional framework is not the universal truth. And, therefore, that it can learn from an other culture. Indigenous Offerings: A Grounded Morality In a relevant application of Nussbaum’s argument, Lopez posits that we desperately need a more comprehensive understanding of the both the Arctic and the environment as a whole. He is clear, however, that more data will not unlock this understanding. Lopez writes, “If we are to devise an enlightened plan for human activity in the Arctic, we need a more particularized understanding of the land itself—not a more refined mathematical knowledge but a deeper understanding of its nature, as if it were, itself, another sort of civilization we had to reach some agreement with.”49 In a cosmopolitan solution, Lopez urges us to look outside the Western framework to Indigenous cultures, who have a different conception of both our place in the world and of our obligations toward nature.50 In the West, the separation and consequent hierarchy between intellectual and physical realms results in the devaluation of the environment. Moral obligations are bestowed on the basis of rationality and thus non-human entities are, for the most part, not considered worthy of ethical consideration. In fact, people are encouraged, through 49 Lopez, 11. Emhardt, 541. For example, in the 1980s the International Whaling Commission worked with Inuit hunters to collect data on bowhead whale populations. The collaborative technique was more accurate than the original study, counting 10,000 whales as opposed to the initial 1,300. 50 33 technology and industrialization, to overpower nature for the sake of human ‘progress’ and civilization. Problematically, climate change is making it increasingly clear that this ideology is not sustainable. Indigenous epistemology, however, leads to a different ethical system with a fresh set of moral obligations. For Indigenous cultures, ethics is not prescriptive; there are no moral imperatives derived from a decontextualized rationality. Rather, morality, like epistemology, is contextually grounded and ‘placed’: we create ethics through everyday practices and interactions. Since every action has the possibility of impacting the world, nothing human beings do is morally neutral or insignificant. It follows that, in another departure from Western ethics, our obligations do not end with the human being. As Lopez writes “For Eskimos, most relationships with animals are local and personal. The animals one encounters are part of one’s community, and one has obligations to them. A most confusing aspect of Western culture for Eskimos to grasp is our depersonalization of relationships with the human and animal members of our communities.”51 Indigenous ethics dictates that every being (rational or not) has its own telos, its own goals, which we are required to recognize as an extension of our relationality.52 For instance, Indigenous peoples believe the telos of a sled dog is to run and pull. Mushing therefore allows the dog to fulfill what it means to be the kind of animal it is. Moreover, what is important is not only one’s interaction with a specific animal, but a relationship with the population and ecosystem as a whole. As Burkhart writes, “American Indians often say that the people are an ear of corn. We may try to just think 51 Lopez, 180. Interestingly, this is similar to Aristotle’s understanding of beings. Mark Linsenmayer interview with Jim Marunich, “Relating to American Indian Philosophy,” The Partially Examined Life, podcast audio, October 2, 2017. 52 34 of each little kernel of corn on the ear, the individuals, but to do so is to take away what from what the kernels are: an ear of corn. On an earth that suffers each day from environmental catastrophes of tragic proportion, we would do well to learn from this thought.”53 Environmental problems arise when we forget, as Western cultures often do, that we need to respect and attend to this balance. And, although rationality is not the defining characteristic of humanity for Indigenous cultures, the capacity to reason does bestow human beings with additional responsibilities. By virtue of our unique ability to understand the world around us, people are charged with maintaining the harmony of nature rather than triumphing over it. The implication is that Indigenous thought can help us redefine the goal of society. In his ethnography of the Koyukon tribe in interior Alaska, Richard Nelson describes how the Indigenous understanding of what it means to occupy the land differs from the Western. In an effort to “[separate] ourselves from the world that animals occupy,” Western civilizations emphasize expansion and modernization in the form of industrialization.54 As Oscar Kawagley also emphasizes in A Yupiaq Worldview, “One of the interests of the Western corporate world has been the resources found in the Arctic. In their desire to exploit and extract these resources, they have overwhelmed and displaced the people [Indigenous] to the land.”55 Westerners viewed this ‘unknown’ land as an opportunity for personal progress rather than valuable as place. However, Nelson writes of Alaska, “The fact that Westerners identify this remote country as wilderness reflects their inability to conceive of occupying and utilizing the environment without altering its 53 Burkart, 26. Lopez, 180. 55 Oscar Kawagley, A Yupiaq Worldview: A Pathway to Ecology and Spirit (Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press, 1995), 88-89. 54 35 natural state.”56 Part of the story Westerners tell to justify Manifest Destiny is that it was their duty to utilize an untouched land. Yet the land was not unoccupied; Indigenous peoples had lived in North America for thousands of years. True, there was little evidence of human influence—a lack of development that led Westerners to believe that tribes were inept and lacking rationality. But this could not have been further from the truth. While Indigenous peoples had little to “show” in the Western sense of what it means to be a ‘productive’ society, it did not mean they had no impact on the land. As confusing as this may be from Western presuppositions, the fact that the land was mostly unchanged was the significant fact. That is, Native American tribes were able to maintain the harmony of the environment by living with, rather than opposed to, place. Because they recognize that their future is fundamentally entwined with the environment, the Koyukon do not attempt to manipulate the land. As Nelson writes, “The Koyukon must move with the forces of their surroundings, not attempting to control, master, or fundamentally alter them. They do not confront nature, they yield to it.”57 Unlike Western cultures, the Koyukon do not strive to overpower the land but rather embrace place and their vulnerability to nature. To return to the Lopez quote, Indigenous groups view place as another civilization. Rather than engaging in an eternal and ultimately unsuccessful war with the environment, coexistence in a cosmopolitan sense means working with— which sometimes requires conceding to—the landscape. Nelson argues that the ability to have a mutual rather than conflictual relationship with the environment is a greater accomplishment than any city or technological 56 Richard Nelson, Make Prayers to the Raven: A Koyukon View of the Northern Forest (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 246. 57 Nelson, 240. 36 innovation. The reason for this is that coexisting with the land is a more sustainable way of relating to our surroundings than the continuous striving to separate ourselves from the world around us. As Burkhart writes, “Western thought, philosophy, and science, have gotten us far, we suppose. We have, through technology, become nearly invincible, but we have forgotten how we are related.”58 Technology, because it allows people to enhance their autonomy and thus minimize their vulnerability, is the means by which human beings attempt to distance themselves from their physical and social context. But to forget our place and the fact of our mutually implicating relationality is extremely problematic because we forget that our well-being is inseparable from the earth’s. This disregard of place is the thought process which led to climate change, which does impact all of our destinies. However, we cannot forget the principle of relatedness—that we are part of a larger ear of corn—indefinitely. Sooner or later (and climate change is suggesting sooner) we will be reminded of our connectedness to the earth and our shared fate. Interestingly, then, climate change is an opportunity to consider our connectedness not only to the earth, but also, given that it is a global issue, our relationships with other cultures. Relationality before Rationality: Judith Butler’s Ethic As current policy is inadequate and the loss of Indigenous groups is dangerous on several levels, it is pertinent to explore another approach for a universal ethic. Judith Butler provides an interesting alternative. Butler offers using the vulnerability inherent to the human body as a way of reconceptualizing ethics. Treating others according to the 58 Burkhart, 26. 37 capacity to lose is a radically different way of conceiving of our obligations to others and one which is better able to protect vulnerable populations. First, Butler moves beyond rational objectivity by acknowledging the social aspect of the human being. She attends to the particular tenuousness of certain populations by positing that we have additional obligations toward these groups. Her subjectivity fills in where current policy, grounded in objectivity, rationality and autonomy, falls short. Second, because our necessary connectivity is central to her morality, Butler’s ethic better corresponds to the Indigenous culture’s interrelational worldview. Butler begins with the obvious, yet often overlooked: even before we are reasoning beings, we are dependent upon others. Since our relationship with the other precedes our ability to reason, the primary condition of a human being is not autonomy but reliance grounded in bodily vulnerability.59 What matters is not the individual alone—a level of individuality which exists only as a theoretical abstraction—but our embeddedness in a social context. Furthermore, by virtue of embodiment, we are constantly exposed and thus at the risk of violence; this vulnerability is the universal human condition in which Butler bases her ethic. As she explains her project: “I propose to consider a dimension of political life that has to do with our exposure to violence and our complicity in it, with our vulnerability to loss and the task of mourning that follows, and with finding a basis for community in these conditions.”60 Butler believes our primary dependence automatically places us into an ethical relationship. To fulfill this relationship, according to Butler, we must treat others according their capacity to lose rather than the abstract ability to reason. In practice, an ethic grounded in vulnerability 59 60 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 20. Ibid, 19. 38 means going beyond our obligations toward an autonomous being (which is limited to doing no harm). Since we are already implicated in the life of a vulnerable other, Butler argues that we must actively care for her. Butler departs from an objective ethic when she recognizes for the social context of human beings. That is, although vulnerability is universal, it is not evenly distributed. Butler explains, “Lives are supported and maintained differently, and there are radically different ways in which human physical vulnerability is distributed across the globe.”61 Butler acknowledges that lives are maintained differently and that individuals may have more to lose as a result of socially created inequalities such as historical oppression. Since her ethic dictates that we must attend to the capacity to lose, it follows that we have greater obligations toward those who risk losing more. Because “...the Indigenous experience is one of loss” under Butler’s moral framework we undoubtedly have greater obligations to care for Indigenous climigrants.62 To continue to make decisions in an objective and utilitarian manner, as if Indigenous communities have nothing more to lose than Western towns, is a violation of Butler’s care-based ethic. The obligation to provide extra support stems from, in Butler’s words, both their greater “exposure to violence” as well as “our complicity in it.”63 Another benefit of Butler’s ethic is that it better correlates to Indigenous values. In essence describing a relational worldview, Butler goes as far as to posit that there is no “I” before “we.”64 By this she means that an individual does not exist in isolation; she is always comprised by her relationships with others. This makes community particularly 61 Ibid, 32. Ivanoff. 63 Butler, 19. 64 Butler, 22. 62 39 important because the loss of a friend is not only the loss of the person, but also the tie and therefore a part of ourselves. Butler recognizes that individuals cannot easily relinquish relationships and simply form new ties because the person in an important way does not exist without her connections. This gestures toward the fact that human beings are not only physically vulnerable—with our intrinsic connectedness comes the capacity to lose not only bodily, but emotionally. This loss, too, should be accounted for. Since it results in diaspora and an inability to maintain the Indigenous way of life, collocation would be fundamentally unacceptable for Butler. And, since the loss of community would be particularly catastrophic for Indigenous populations, we are obligated to attend to their need for community by providing them with more care. As costly as it may be for the government, the emotional, and ultimately moral, savings of keeping an Indigenous community intact make relocation more than worth the money. Practical Applications Throughout this paper, I have argued that it is crucial to preserve diversity for the sake of the individual, the cultural particular, and the global community as a whole. I have also argued that current policies are not adequately protecting Indigenous populations. Now that the foundation has been laid for a new approach to morality, I will examine what an ethic that prioritizes particularity would look like when applied to Alaska Native climigrants. I argue that caring means actively working to maintain the culture, even though it requires devoting additional funding to Indigenous communities. An initial step toward protecting Indigenous climigrants is to acknowledge that current methods of climate change adaptation are unsustainable and already resulting in 40 diaspora and cultural loss. We must accept that relocation, though expensive, is an urgent necessity for many communities. To this end, Bronen argues that the Stafford Act needs to be amended to provide funding for rebuilding in different locations.65 Furthermore, she explains, there must be a strategic relocation plan designating the roles of different federal and state agencies and specifies the role of the local government. Devoting additional resources toward moving towns requires going beyond Western assumptions about value and the importance of place. It also requires relinquishing the delusion that human beings have complete command over nature. In this sense, implementing relocation policies at all is a step in the right direction. When it becomes clear that relocation is unavoidable, a further step is determining which communities will be able to relocate and which will be dissolved into existing cities. According to Bronen, cost-benefit analyses must be amended to capture the importance of subsistence, and thus the land, to the Alaska Native culture. It follows that federal aid cannot be granted uniformly but must prioritize Indigenous communities even if, according to objective analyses, the funding could have been more effectively spent on a larger city. Finally, one of the best ways to support Indigenous Alaskans is to give them the authority to make decisions regarding the fates of their communities. So, if an Indigenous community wants to move because relocation is the only way to maintain their way of life, we are obligated to do everything in our power to facilitate and expedite the process. According to Marino, this additional care—as bad economic policy as it may be—is not too much to ask when viewed morally and as reparation for past wrongs. As she succinctly puts it, “It’s not that much money. Compared to what relocation would 65 Bronen, “Climate-Induced Community Relocations: Creating an Adaptive Governance Framework Based in Human Rights Doctrine.” 41 save, compared to what colonialization cost, and compared to the histories of genocide and resource extraction in Alaska and the culpability of governments for creating risk in the first place, relocation is absolutely affordable.”66 Conclusion: Strength within Vulnerability Butler wrote the essays which comprise her work Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence in response to the events of September 11, 2001. The act of terrorism shook the United States by revealing that even the U.S. is not immune to harm. Uncomfortably, even one of the most powerful nations in the world is not, and cannot ever be, completely sovereign. Butler writes, “…I consider our recent trauma to be an opportunity for reconsideration of United States hubris… this involves a certain ‘loss’ for the country as a whole: the notion of the world itself as a sovereign entitlement of the United States must be given up, lost, and mourned, as narcissistic and grandiose fantasies must be given up, lost and mourned.” In much the same way, climate change reveals a vulnerability to the land, the same dependency Western civilizations work so hard to sever. The country reacted to 9/11 by tightening its borders, a response which Butler took to be a missed opportunity. Instead of fighting vulnerability, which is impossible, she argues it is necessary to work within it. This is true of both political and environmental relations. No matter how much money the government pours into protecting urban areas such as New York City, it is ultimately a losing battle. We must move beyond the Western framework because, as Marino writes, “Rebuilding in the same 66 Marino, 100. 42 way, in the same place leaves no space for reconsidering our relationship with the environment.”67 Instead of armoring up with taller seawalls—fighting vulnerability— Western societies should learn to work with the environment. Interestingly, though, if we follow the Indigenous way of life and move past our myopic focus on rationality and autonomy, it turns out that vulnerability is not necessarily a weakness. As Butler explains, the grief which arises from traumatic situations, by exposing how relationality already connects us, provides human beings with the opportunity to rethink our relationships. And, again, her point holds not only for relationships with other human beings, but for our relationship with the environment. We cannot move toward a better future if we remain bound to futile attempts to overpower nature and silence other cultural perspectives through assimilation. Continuing to do so will result in the wrong kind of Kantian eternal peace. Instead, the way forward requires accepting human embodiment and, with it, our inescapable dependence, weakness and vulnerability. Embracing these traits seems counterintuitive for building a stronger future, but a cosmopolitan will point out that these qualities are not bad, simply different from our own values. In fact, if we finally accept that a human being cannot exist as anything other than a vulnerability, a future opens up. 67 Marino, 23. 43 Dog Mushing Dynamics: The Ethics and Offerings of a PlaceBased Practice In the kingdom of ends, everything has either a price or a dignity. What has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; what on the other hand is raised above all price and therefore admits of no equivalent has a dignity -Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals Getting absolute obedience from a dog…confers nobility, character and dignity on the dog -Vicki Hearne, Adam’s Task The Dog Mushing Debate Dog mushing, Alaska’s official state sport, faces harsh opposition from animal rights organizations, criticism which every year culminates with the running of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in March. Groups such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals argue that the sport is inherently cruel. They claim that mushers treat their dogs poorly, forcing them to run for thousands of miles in harsh conditions for the sake of entertainment and prize money. One PETA protestor explained that she was speaking out against mushing because, “‘We think all animals deserve a basic modicum of respect and dignity, to have their needs met without people exploiting and abusing them.’”68 This statement suggests that people oppose dog mushing because they believe mushers view their dogs as merely a means to gain profit and—in treating them as “little more than snowmobiles with fur”—fail to respect the animals’ interests and thereby degrade their dignity.69 68 69 Zachariah Hughes, “Inside PETA’s Fight to Take Down the Iditarod,” Rolling Stone, March 29, 2018. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, “Sled Dog Racing: De(Accessed January 22, 2020). 44 The underlying reason animal rights groups understand mushing as exploitation is because such organizations approach animal rights from the Western framework, which equates respectful treatment with autonomy. PETA believes mushers treat their animals as a means to an end because, from this perspective, we cannot use other beings for fear of violating their interests and thus degrading them. All working animal relationships are therefore deemed unethical. Yet this critique assumes that animals and human beings have identical interests and thus should be treated in the same way. This is not necessarily the case; what is dignifying for one being may actually be degrading for another. The Western approach, however, cannot recognize this diversity because rights and respect are connected to the Kantian conception of personhood, which is based in rationality and ultimately the definition of the human being. This creates a tension in PETA’s critique: although the organization utilizes Kantian terminology, Kant does not himself extend dignity to animals. As irrational beings, animals fundamentally do not qualify for Kantian personhood—in part because personhood is defined by the capacities that distinguish human beings from animals. Because other beings are measured according to the human function (reason), animals occupy a paradoxical position between autonomous dignities and objects. This proves to be an essentially impossible dichotomy to navigate; problematically, attempts to apply personhood to animals impede our ability to understand and value animals on their own terms. Or, to translate this into Aristotelian language, for their function and telos. Given the limitations of the Western framework, I turn to Indigenous thought as an alternate way of understanding animals and conceiving of our relationships with other creatures. As I explained in the first chapter, Indigenous cultures emphasize 45 interrelationality, which stems from mutual dependence, rather than autonomy. Under these terms, use and respect are not mutually exclusive. Moreover, there is a way in which Indigenous respect for animals is more authentic. Because all beings are defined by their relationships rather than the capacity for reason, mind and body are inseparable. Thus, every being is just as much a body as she is a mind. And, because mental abilities do not carry the same weight, human beings are not understood to be essentially distinct from or superior to other beings. A further benefit of the Indigenous worldview is that personhood does not have the same connection to the human being’s function of reason. Instead, personhood is transitional. Non-human animals become persons through their relationships with human beings as their latent capacities are revealed in relational contexts such as hunting and mushing. This leads human beings to respect other creatures for their unique abilities. Despite mushing’s origins in a radically different framework, the reality is that people no longer depend upon dogs as they once did. The heart of PETA’s critique stems from the fact that dog mushing is both a sport and a practice, which is a tricky line to navigate. Sport has the connotation of frivolous human entertainment, while a practice signifies an activity tied to culture and, ultimately, the continuation of existence itself. Indigenous cultures created dog mushing out of an inter-species dependence—much like the bodily dependence Judith Butler describes—necessary to survive in the harsh climate of the northern regions of the globe. Contemporarily, however, the context is not one of life or death. Rather, mushing takes up the original Indigenous relationship between human beings and dogs in a modern setting: races such as the Iditarod. Yet without the dependence fundamental to the origin of the practice, dog mushing faces the threat of 46 becoming incoherent and potentially cruel—in other words, of becoming exploitation. It follows that a central criticism of dog mushing is that mushers subject their animals to unnecessary suffering. PETA describes the sport as a “…categorically abusive, morally corrupt and a pointless waste of animal life” and suggests that dog teams in the Iditarod be replaced by snowmachines.70 Has something been irrevocably lost, along with the necessary dependence, in the transition from practice to sport? Now that people have access to other modes of transportation (such as snowmachines) should they stop mushing? If interrelationality is not based in survival, can a practice from this framework still make sense as a sport? Or, to rephrase the question, can the musher-dog relationship be coherent in a contemporary context? I argue that even though dog mushing may not be vital for life in the way it once was, this does not mean that the practice is outdated and has nothing to offer. Mushers recognize that the Iditarod is not just a contrived contest but an event which draws from a culture that provides a radically different understanding of what it means to have relationships with animals. Through a re-enactment, the Iditarod provides an example of a human-animal relationship that can inform our interactions with animals more generally. One benefit of the Indigenous framework, which is sustained in dog mushing, is that respecting animals does not require granting them autonomy or otherwise treating them as human beings. In fact, the opposite is true; treating an animal as a human being is a disservice to the animal. To understand why different types of creatures should be treated differently, I draw from Aristotle’s conception of flourishing. According to Aristotle, every being has an interest in flourishing, or achieving its telos: the end of what 70 Hughes. 47 it means to be a particular type of being. How a being flourishes depends upon its species-specific function. Function guides interests; beings have an interest in fulfilling the innate capacities corresponding to their telos. But in order to flourish, animals must be allowed, and in some cases aided, to fulfill their function. This requires understanding the being’s telos—the dogness of the dog—as well as respecting its interests, no matter how different they are from our own. From a framework of flourishing, mushers are not merely reviving a past practice; they are also doing something unique when engaging in the sport. That is, dog mushing reveals the capacity of the dog even though the practice is no longer connected to survival. Mushers are not violating their animals’ interests by asking them to run and pull—this would be exploitative use—but rather are treating them according to the interests corresponding to their telos. In doing so, mushers provide the context for the dogs to flourish. An interesting byproduct of flourishing is that the demanding nature of the activity allows sled dogs to display virtues such as endurance and courage. And, though the contest itself is created, this does not mean that the virtues are not indigenous to dogs. While not necessary for life, such virtues are nevertheless a part of what it means to inhabit a particular place. By developing and displaying virtues, sled dogs gain a physical bearing which can be understood as dignity. Importantly, this dignity is not connected to rationality or human personhood. Instead, it is the completion of the animal, a completion a being can only achieve through engagement in, and therefore realization of, its characteristic function. 48 Partial Persons: Western Conceptions of Animal Rights To grasp the irony of PETA, a Western organization, criticizing an Indigenous practice’s treatment of animals, it is pertinent to examine the Western understandings of both respect and animals. Animal rights and the notion that non-human animals are worthy of moral consideration are relatively new concepts within Western culture and philosophy. This is perhaps unsurprising considering that less than a century ago any being other than a white male was not recognized as a complete person and therefore was not accorded the respect and rights corresponding to personhood. To expand the definition of personhood so that rights are not based in morally arbitrary qualities such as gender or skin color, many philosophers turned to mental capacities. The same technique was later used in an attempt to grant moral recognition to members of other species. Importantly, while doing so widened the category of personhood beyond the human, it did not involve critically examining or rethinking what it means to be a person. Instead, personhood is still tied to the definition of the human being as a rational thinking thing insofar as it requires the capacity for certain mental processes.71 Though today most people recognize nonhuman animals as being more than self-moving machines (the Cartesian definition of the animal; Descartes believed animals lacked souls), we attempt to fit them within the preexisting framework for human personhood. However, the majority of animals are not clearly rational. This creates issues for granting other 71 Personhood, and what exactly constitutes a person and why, is a highly controversial and hotly debated topic. A common definition is that a being qualifies for personhood if she has the capacity for reflection and a sense of self which extends over time. Peter Singer describes a person as “A self-conscious being is aware of itself as a distinct entity, with a past and a future.” Singer, Practical Ethics, 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, 76. For context, most human beings are considered become persons around age three. 49 creatures rights because the Western conception of rights still draws heavily from Kantian ideals of respect accorded on the basis of rationality. Kant bases his ethical system in reason. In his kingdom of ends, “…everything has either a price or a dignity. Whatever has a price can be replaced by something as its equivalent; on the other hand, whatever is above all price, and therefore admits of no equivalent, has a dignity.”72 Reason bestows individuals with the autonomy to decide to follow (or not follow) the categorical imperative. According to Kant, autonomy is the basis for dignity because the ability to make rationally calculated decisions makes lives unique and thus irreplaceable. In this way, rational beings derive their worth—or rather, their pricelessness—from the ability to self-legislate. The capacities for reason and autonomy, and the dignity which derives from possessing these abilities, are the defining features of Kantian personhood: Kant uses the terms “autonomies” and “dignities” interchangeably with persons. He explains, “…rational beings are called persons inasmuch as their nature already marks them out as ends in themselves.”73 Kant’s ethical framework is summarized in this statement: the significance of personhood is that we are categorically required to respect beings with dignity as ends in themselves. This requires granting an individual the autonomy to follow her will; impeding this ability would be to use her as a mere means to our own end. Kant’s influence on animal rights organizations is apparent in PETA’s language of respect and dignity. By framing mushing as exploitation and abuse—terms diametrically opposed to respect and dignity—PETA portrays dog mushing as categorically degrading to animal dignity. 72 Immanuel Kant and James W. Ellington, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, (Indianapolis IN: Hackett Pub, 1981), 40. 73 Ibid, 36. 50 Kant’s own definitions, however, undermine PETA’s argument. For Kant, irrational beings are incapable of directing their lives and therefore are not considered unique. One can simply be replaced by another; hence why irrational lives are assessed in terms of price rather than dignity. Since they lack both a will and a dignity to degrade, we are not obligated to respect beings that are incapable of autonomy. Thus, we can ethically use them as a means to our desired ends. The unfortunate implication of Kant’s dichotomy is that animals, due to their inability to reason, are relegated to the status of objects. As Christine Korsgaard explains, “Kant himself identifies the moment in which human beings first realized we are ends in ourselves with the moment we first made a contrast between ourselves and the other animals, and ‘no longer regarded them as fellow creatures, but as means and instruments to be used at will for the attainment of whatever ends he pleased.’”74 For his part, Kant states that people do have a sort of obligation toward animals. However, our duties toward animals are indirect: human beings should treat other creatures well, but only because mistreating them reflects poorly upon the person. That aside, Kant—the very framework from which PETA draws its critique against mushing—clearly and fundamentally excludes animals from respect and moral consideration in and of themselves. Moreover, he does so on the grounds that animals lack dignity, the very quality which PETA claims mushing degrades.75 That Kant believed we have even indirect obligations toward animals despite considering them to be objects points toward a tension in the Western understanding of 74 Christine Korsgaard, Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals, First ed. Uehiro Series in Practical Ethics (Oxford, United Kingdom; New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018), 113. 75 People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, “Sled Dog Racing: Death on the Trails,” 51 animals. Animals, situated between rational (human) beings and objects, occupy a paradoxical status within society. Today, Kant’s influence is reflected in the fact that non-human beings are, quite literally, assigned prices: animals are legally considered property. As Gary Francione puts it, “When it comes to other animals, we humans exhibit what can best be described as moral schizophrenia. Although we claim to take animals seriously and to regard them as having morally significant interests, we routinely ignore those interests for trivial reasons…our moral schizophrenia is related to the status of animals as property, which means that animals are nothing more than things despite the many laws that supposedly protect them.”76 The implication of being able to ethically use animals as a means to an end is that, even though we may recognize that animals have interests we should account for, we will never take their interests as seriously as our own. We justify our moral schizophrenia on the grounds that animals have lesser mental capacities. Problematically, if obligations are determined on the basis of mental abilities, which are measured against our own, other beings will never be worthy of the same degree of respect. Yet basing treatment entirely upon mental capacities quickly gets complicated because some highly intelligent animals, such as chimps, can have mental lives greater than those of severely disabled human beings. It then becomes morally difficult to justify why it is acceptable to, for example, put the former in a cage but not the latter—a point to which I will return with Elizabeth Anderson. That aside, even Kant recognizes it is wrong to treat animals, which have interests inanimate objects to not, as mere things. But the other extreme of the dichotomy is just as problematic. 76 Gary Francione, “Animals: Property or Persons” in Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, eds. Cass Sunstein and Martha Nussbaum, (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 108. 52 Though most people believe we have greater obligations toward animals than we do toward stones, further issues arise when we attempt to treat animals as autonomies or as human beings. Most animal rights groups condemn dog mushing (and some are critical even of pet keeping) because animals cannot consent or dissent to the relationship. As the late animal trainer and philosopher Vicki Hearne writes in her article “What’s Wrong with Animal Rights,” “People who claim to speak for animal rights are increasingly devoted to the idea that the very keeping of a dog or a horse or a gerbil or a lion is in and of itself an offense…”77 The underlying reason such organizations view the relationship between musher and dog, and even owner and pet, as a degradation of the animal is due to the dichotomy Kant sets up between autonomy and use. The Kantian framework leaves us with two options for our treatment of other beings: we either respect them or we use them; there is no middle ground. And, because we can never be sure of animal interests, any interaction can be categorized as use. It follows that the only way to respect a being is by granting it autonomy—hence why some animal rights organizations mandate that we end all relationships with animals. “So Like Us:” A Dysfunctional Approach Kant’s project is to create an a priori ethic, so he intentionally ignores other aspects of the human being, including the relationality and lived experience I discussed in the first chapter of this thesis. However, the idea that ethics can be purely reason-based is representative of a larger trend within Western philosophy: lives are understood and valued solely on the basis of thought capacities. This approach overlooks the fact that 77 Vicki Hearne, “What’s Wrong with Animal Rights: Of Hounds, Horses, and Jeffersonian Happiness,” Harper’s 283, no. 1696 (1991), 64. 53 there is much more to beings, including human beings, than the ability to reason (or the lack thereof). And, further problematically, the assumption that beings are defined by their mental abilities creates problems in our relationships with animals. Mental lives are measured according to the function of the human being, which is reason. The implication is that we do not understand other beings for their own functions or telos, but rather as incomplete human beings. As a result, when we respect animals at all, we do so not on their own terms but by virtue of their proximity to humanity. Martha Nussbaum refers to this technique as the “So Like Us” approach. Referencing the Kantian dichotomy between dignity and object, Nussbaum explains her problem with the approach. She writes, “Some animals get in, but only because they are like us. The first door is opened, but then it is slammed shut behind us: nobody else gets in. Instead of the old line, we have a slightly different line, but it is not really all that different, and most of the animal world still lies outside in the dark domain of mere thinghood.”78 One of Nussbaum’s central critiques of the “So Like Us” method is that it maintains a hierarchical conception of creatures, at which human beings are at the top. The power of creating the hierarchy is that intelligence scales measure what human beings find important. Animals will never achieve a human benchmark of intelligence; they may be intelligent, but they are intelligent relative to the human standard, not their own. According to Nussbaum, the hierarchical understanding of beings outlined in the “So Like Us” approach does not reflect the reality of lived experience. She argues that, contrary to Kant’s purely a priori ethic and the Cartesian conception of the human being as first and foremost a thinking thing, creatures are defined by more than their mental 78 Nussbaum, 5. 54 abilities. Instead of a hierarchy, Nussbaum explains, “What we see are thousands of different life-forms, all exhibiting a kind of ordered striving toward survival, flourishing, and reproduction. Life-forms don’t line up to be graded on a single scale, they are all wonderfully different.”79 One way to move away from an anthropocentric hierarchy toward an understanding of beings on their own “wonderfully different” terms is through Nussbaum’s Aristotelian inspired reference to “flourishing.”80 All beings share the desire to fulfill the capacities that define what it means to be the type of being they are; this desire guides and organizes the creatures’ particular interests. Animals may have some of the same capacities that human beings do, but they lack an inherent interest in fulfilling them. For example, Nussbaum writes, chimps are capable of learning sign language. However, they only sign in human contexts; this suggests that they have no natural interest in the activity. So, while chimps are able to gain skills that signify intelligence on human terms and are useful for navigating within our world, these capacities are not related to the chimp function or telos. Despite how well-meaning our intentions may be, coercing other animals into fulfilling the human telos will not result in their flourishing. Rather, it is likely to have the opposite effect: the animal, unable to achieve its own telos, will be a partial but never complete human being and thereby will be stunted and degraded. For an animal to flourish, we need to understand the being for its own function and interests rather than in reference to the human telos and the function we value. This has important implications for dog mushing; as I will address in more detail in the final section, there is a way in which sled dogs fulfill their function, and therefore flourish, in a way that pet dogs do not. 79 80 Ibid, 5. Ibid, 5. 55 Positional Personal: Indigenous Perspectives on Animals Indigenous cultures provide a different understanding of what it means to respect both lives in general and animals in particular. Their worldview allows us to move beyond the “So Like Us Approach” and conceptions personhood bound to the definition of the human being. It does so primarily because Indigenous cultures work from an interrelational framework. According to this worldview, beings are defined by their relationships. Relationality stems from physical embodiment—beings are, first and foremost, bodies in the world. Mind and body are inseparable, which undoes the basis for human superiority and allows Indigenous cultures to respect other creatures on their own terms. Importantly, by emphasizing relationality rather than rationality, interrelationality undoes Cartesian dualism—the basis for the belief that human beings are essentially and distinctly superior. As Frédérik Laugrand and Jarich Oosten write, “If the person or self is, before all else, a being-in-the-world… it follows that world in this sense is not something that the self can get outside of or stand beside as a self-contained Cartesian ‘mind.’ This is because, first, a self that is in-the-world is necessarily embodied.”81 Being, therefore, is not a byproduct of thinking, but the result of being connected with others, a connection which derives from embodiment and ultimately bodily vulnerability. In this way, mind and body cannot be separated; thus, a human person is just as much a body—a being—as she is a mind, and a dog is just as much of a being as a human person. As Laugrand and Oosten explain, “In this perspective, the animistic ontology inverts the naturalistic perspective of Western societies that, since Descartes, has considered the 81 Ibid, 21. 56 intrinsic qualities of human beings as different, and at the same time accepts a Darwinistic evolutionary view emphasizing continuity on a physical level.”82 As is evident in the Korsgaard quote previously cited, the defining feature of the human being is the function that separates us from animals (the capacity for rational thought) rather than what we fundamentally share; namely, a body with a particular perspective on the world—a perspective that informs our function. Since we place ourselves atop the hierarchy, all non-human beings are, as Nussbaum puts it, relegated to the “dark domain of mere thinghood.”83 The Indigenous attitude toward animals, on the other hand, is one of charity; they assume that other creatures are intelligent, endowed with consciousness and may even have souls. The difference between human beings and animals is physical rather than essential. Laugrand and Oosten write, “In such a universe the intrinsic qualities of beings remain the same, whereas the differences manifest themselves especially in bodily appearances.”84 Animals are not fundamentally inferior to human beings: their mental capacities simply manifest themselves differently due to differences in physical form. Importantly, the reason Indigenous cultures prioritize relationality rather than rationality is because the harsh climate made autonomy impossible for irrational and rational beings alike. In this context, human beings relied upon animals perhaps more than the animals (with the potential exception of dogs) depended upon them. This dependence suggests that reason, while beneficial, is for practical survival purposes not as valuable as Western philosophy understands it to be—a reality which obscures the clear hierarchy of functions 82 Frédérek Laugrand and J.G. Oosten, Hunters, Predators and Prey: Inuit Perceptions of Animals, (New York: Oxford, England: Berghahn, 2015), 12. 83 Nussbaum, 5. 84 Laugrand and Oosten, 12. 57 outlined in the “So Like Us” approach. The Indigenous emphasis on dependence both breaks down the power hierarchy and has interesting implications for interrelational ethics. Interrelational Ethics: Respectful Use We can accept that the Indigenous framework conceives of animals differently and we can understand how defining animals as different but not essentially inferior beings may lead to a greater respect for functions other than our own. Still, there initially appears to be a tension between Indigenous thought and practice. That is, respect seems contradictory given that hunting is a crucial component of cultural continuity (and historically literal survival) for Indigenous peoples. Yet, in an interrelational context, respect is grounded in mutual dependence and framed in the greater context of survival. This, in turn, allows for different forms of use because ethics is not framed in terms of an individual’s will or mind but group survival. The Indigenous framework provides a way of escaping the Kantian dichotomy between respect and use because using—and even killing—animals does not undermine respect. This is an important point for dog mushing because, though historically dog teams were used for transportation and hunting, the animals were (and are) much more than tools. As opposed to a framework of autonomy, which presumes that interests are focused on the individual, in an interrelational worldview there is no self distinct from the other. Since a being is defined by its group (or pack), interests are decentered—all beings have a mutual interest in the group’s survival. Thus, an animal is not being taken against its will; it is offering its life for the continuation of a people who depend upon it. The act of killing, then, is not a violation of autonomy but the animal fulfilling its telos by 58 contributing to the survival of the whole (even if this survival comes at the expense of the individual’s life). Interestingly, not only is killing not a degradation, it is also compatible with a high level of respect. Support for this claim comes in the fact that, as Laugrand and Oosten, explain, taking an animal’s life can coexist with the ultimate respectful relationship: friendship. They write, “Clearly, eating the dogs and friendship with the dogs are by no means incompatible…The affection felt for the dogs does not exclude that the dogs are eaten if necessity requires doing so. There is no contradiction there. It only strengthens the bond between human beings and dogs.”85 The idea that killing and eating any animal—let alone a dog—while simultaneously viewing it as a friend is incomprehensible from the Western perspective. Yet under an interrelational framework, owner and dog are believed to mutually constitute one another. When two beings comprise a physical and social whole, consumption does not undermine the bond between human and animal but is instead a furthering of the preexisting relationship.86 In light of the above quote, it is important to note that dogs were not a typical food source. The animals were only eaten in times of severe desperation because they occupied a unique position, both literally and ontologically, in Indigenous societies. Dogs “seem to be always between:” they are understood to be situated between human and animal worlds as well as between the domestic and wild realms.87 Of all animals, dogs are perceived to be the most human—a perception which is a result of dogs’ relationality rather than essential characteristics. Eating dogs was somewhat taboo because, for both ontological and social reasons, it was thought to be the first step toward cannibalism. 85 Laugrand and Oosten, 151. Ibid, 172. 87 Ibid, 151. 86 59 Dogs’ proximity to humanity is reflected in the fact that they are often given the names of deceased human relatives. By virtue of their names, and their ability to respond to human calls, dogs maintain a social status within communities. As Laugrand and Oosten explain, “The dog is the animal that comes closest to human beings, as a hunting companion that only survives in human society.”88 This quote points toward the fact that the dogs also depended upon the human beings. Today, this dependence is not only necessary for the animal’s physical survival, but also because dogs require human beings to flourish. This is particularly true of sled dogs who, I will argue, require a relationship with a human being and the context of mushing to engage in their embodied function and fulfill their telos. Despite the dogs’ membership in human society, the Inuit did not integrate the animals into their communities as they did human members. This difference, which is perhaps due to their ontological betweenness, is reflected in the Inuit’s treatment of the dogs. The “Inuit always maintain their distance to dogs and traditionally never allowed them in their living space.”89 Though the animals relied upon human beings for food, they were not domesticated pets. Semi-wild, they lived outside, roamed free and existed with very little human care. For the Inuit this was the proper treatment for the type of animal the dog is; that is, a being on the border of tame and wild. But, while the Inuit believed that they were respecting the dogs’ interest in wildness, Western cultures deemed this treatment neglectful. When Western colonial powers forced the Canadian Inuit to transition from their nomadic lifestyle into settled communities, the group’s dogs did not fare well. The event, which has become known as the “Mountie Sled Dog 88 89 Ibid, 352. Ibid, 352. 60 Massacre,” tragically highlights the clash of different ways of life with disparate understandings and presuppositions about what it means to respect an animal.90 The Canadian government created laws regulating the dogs in order to prevent fights, bites and the spread of disease. As a result, the Inuit were required to keep their sled dogs on chains. For the Inuit, bringing the dogs in the house or restricting their freedom was far worse than allowing them to fend for themselves. From the Inuit perspective, treating dogs as human beings is both inappropriate and a cruel degradation of the animal’s telos and social and ontological betweenness. Not wanting their dogs to live enchained and sedentary lives—which would degrade the type of animal the sled dog is—many individuals killed their own animals. On the surface, this seems to be an act of cruelty. Yet the Inuit killed their dogs not out of a lack of regard for the animals, but because they understood death to be a more respectful alternative. To attempt to bring the dogs completely into the human world is to contradict the animals’ interest in wildness—for the Inuit, this, and not death, was the true degradation of the animal. There is a further reason why bringing sled dogs fully into human society is degrading. Another implication of a settled lifestyle, and the simultaneous introduction of technology, was that the Inuit no longer needed dogs for survival. Thus, colonization broke the bond between human beings and dogs; the animals effectively became superfluous. The loss had serious implications for even the animals who were not killed. With neither the need for dependence nor the established relational context, people and 90 This time period was referred to as a “massacre” because group’s dog population significantly diminished when sick and aggressive dogs were terminated. Susan, McHugh, “‘A Flash Point in Inuit Memories’”: Endangered Knowledges in the Mountie Sled Dog Massacre.” ESC: English Studies in Canada 39, no. 1 (2013): 149-75. 61 dogs no longer constituted a physical and social whole. Without this relationship, or the context of mushing, the dogs were unable to engage in their function. This, in turn, hindered their ability to flourish. Decades later, a similar phenomenon is occurring in Alaska today; parallels to colonization include an increasing reliance on technology and the clash of two conceptual frameworks over what it means to respect an animal. As Hughes writes, “That dogs deserve dignity and respect is a point on which just about every musher and Iditarod superfan agrees. The question is what constitutes a dignified, respected dog. And on that point, there’s a massive philosophical and political difference that is now coming to a head in Alaska, threatening not just the Iditarod as an event, but the livelihoods and lifestyles of the mushers who race in it.”91 Alaskans no longer need dogs for practical purposes and teams are becoming more and more rare. And, with the prevalence of snowmachines, dog mushing is also becoming difficult to morally justify. Similar to the Inuit, however, mushers believe that they are respecting the animals by helping them realize a function they were born to engage in. To enjoy the Alaskan landscape without using animals, PETA proposes that the Iditarod be run with snowmachines—a virtueless activity. However, PETA’s suggestion misses that this “substitution” would render the race unrecognizable to the point that it would completely obliterate the sport and, with it, an important chunk of Alaskan history. For context, there already is a snowmachine race across Alaska, named, ironically enough, the Iron Dog. But, Hughes writes, the two winter events are not interchangeable because “though it uses many of the same trails, the Iron Dog is historically, culturally and physically a completely different animal than a 91 Hughes. 62 sled-dog race.”92 Running the Iditarod with snowmachines would be the equivalent of turning the Kentucky Derby into a NASCAR race. This suggestion is problematic on several levels, one of which is that it could be considered an act of colonization. Since it is a way of reclaiming a practice lost to colonization, dog mushing allows Indigenous peoples to reconnect with their ancestors. For Indigenous mushers, the sport is about keeping their culture alive and maintaining continuity with the past. As I argued in the first chapter, cultural practices such as mushing should be preserved for their vitality to the Indigenous culture. As one race fan said of 2011 winner John Baker, the first Inupiaq musher to win the Iditarod, “This is a historic race, not just from the Iditarod perspective, but for the first time in the history of this race, a musher of Inupiaq descent from Western Alaska is about to fulfill our ambitions for our customary and traditional livelihood.”93 Each year, Alaska Native mushers compete in the Iditarod and other longdistance races, and many more have recreational dog teams. That dog mushing has not morphed into something unrecognizable to Indigenous groups is apparent in that Alaska Native mushers are often at the pinnacle of the sport, the most recent example being 2019 Iditarod winner Pete Kaiser, a Yup’ik from Bethel, Alaska. Kaiser, the fifth Alaska Native musher to win the Iditarod, has won his hometown race, the Kuskokwim 300, five times. Such successes suggest that it is possible for an Indigenous practice to successfully transfer into a contemporary and increasingly more Western context. Similarly, then, aspects of their relationships with animals that Indigenous cultures got right can translate to current day mushing. 92 Ibid. Tracy Sabo, “History made as Native Son Wins Iditarod in Alaska,” CNN, Cable News Network, March 15, 2011, http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/03/15/alaska.iditarod/index.html (Accessed February 15, 2020). 93 63 Positional Personhood One benefit of the Indigenous framework is that their conception of personhood does not have the same connection to the human being that the Western does. This allows for more inclusivity and a different way of granting respect. The Yukaghir people in the Russian Far East, for example, believe that non-human animals transition in and out of personhood during relational activities such as hunting. Willerslev writes, “For the Yukaghirs…animals and other nonhumans are conceived as persons, not because personhood has been bestowed upon them by some kind of cognitive processing, but because they reveal themselves as such within relational contexts of real-life activities, such as during hunting.”94 Personhood is neither an innate attribute nor characterized by rational autonomy. Instead, it is defined by the antithesis of autonomy: relationality. An animal becomes a person as our interactions with the animal provide the context for the being’s pertinent virtues to reveal themselves. The human being then respects the animal for its function and the abilities stemming from the being’s telos; in other words, for the kind of being it is. Interestingly, dog mushing is a contemporary example of this type of inter-species relationship. In this way, mushing serves as a means of cultural continuity as well as a concrete way to extend one way in which Indigenous peoples can help improve our relationships with animals. Mushers provide the context for sled dogs to engage in their characteristic function. Thus, the relationship between mushers and dogs, and the joint endeavor in which they engage, brings out the dog’s inherent capacities and leads to flourishing. Mushers then respect the dogs for those inherent capacities rather than as 94 Willerslev, 19-20. 64 partial human beings. This suggests that even in a contemporary context, Indigenous practices provide an approach for granting respect to animals that moves beyond the problematic “So Like Us” method. As background, respect for sled dogs has a long history within Indigenous cultures. Traditionally, hunters valued their dogs, particularly their lead dogs, for their unique capacities such as reading and navigating sea ice and tracking seals. Because the dogs’ skills exceed those of the human being in these areas, such capacities made the animals ideal survival companions. In part due to this interspecies dependence, the dogs were understood as, and respected as, hunting partners rather than beasts of burden. Hunting then, and mushing today, demonstrate that use and respect are not mutually exclusive terms. An example of the respect between musher and dog comes from the Soiot people. Among this group, a man decides when to hunt by assessing the mood of his lead dog.95 If the dog was running, jumping and otherwise appeared eager to go, the musher put together a team and hunted; if the dog did not look excited, they did not hunt that day. Crucially, “A dog’s disposition was so important for a hunter to access, precisely because his relations with the dog were not defined merely by his authority as master.”96 This illuminates how, when people are also dependent upon their dogs, the authority and superiority of the human being begins to break down. The musher was ultimately in charge; however, he respected the lead dog’s interests as a vital component of the hunting 95 I am using the masculine pronoun because hunting is a historically very gendered practice. Traditionally, nearly all hunters were male. The connection between dog mushing, hunting and manhood is apparent in that, in some Indigenous societies, owning dogs was considered a crucial component of manhood because the dogs allowed the man to provide for his family. 96 Alexander Oehler, “Hunters in Their Own Right: Perspectival Sharing in Soiot Hunters and Their Dogs” in Dogs in the North: Stories of Cooperation and Co-domestication, Eds Robert Losey, Robert Wishart and Jan Peter Laurens Loovers. (Arctic Worlds. New York, NY: Routledge, an Imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, 2018), 34. 65 process. That the dogs’ interests were carefully assessed and accounted for counters PETA’s critique that the musher-dog relationship is fundamentally and necessarily one of use. On the contrary, such examples suggest that it is possible to have a working relationship with an animal and simultaneously respect it. It follows that one way respect is apparent is in the level and type of communication between species. The hunt depended not only upon the dogs’ attitudes, but also upon the hunter’s ability to read the dogs. This points toward the fact that, to hunt successfully, dogs and hunters had to deeply understand and trust one another. In an extreme example, for the Soiot people the unity of species takes place not through language, but through the merging of points of view. Oehler defines the phenomenon of “perspectival sharing,” explaining that “divergent perspectives of the landscape are engaged here on the basis of a mutual attribution of autonomy. Human hunters recognize dogs as hunters in their own right, relying on, and encouraging, their body-specific skills. [In a complementary way] dogs are seen to rely on the body-specific abilities of their human collaborators.”97 In relational practices such as hunting, worldviews corresponding to different bodies merge to create a fuller picture. Oehler writes, “…Canines and humans collectively construct meaning, each actively drawing on the perspective advantages they recognize in the other’s perspective.”98 Since the difference in perspectives is due to physical form, each species has its own strengths, blind spots and virtues. When working together, the worldviews combine to form the strongest possible picture. The complete picture is neither dog nor human; the two species together make sense of reality. This perspective, which was necessary for survival, would not be 97 98 Ibid, 29. Ibid, 29. 66 possible from a framework of autonomy or if the world was understood solely in terms of the human mind. Perspectival sharing is a unique conception of an inter-species relationship. However, it is relevant because a clear parallel between the musher-dog relationship and the Indigenous worldview is the way mushers and dogs, in working together, form a cohesive whole. Today, their success or failure will not result in life or death. But, much like Indigenous hunters, mushers must be able to read and communicate with their dogs. Returning to Hearne, communication is important because, “We can follow, understand, only things and people we can command, and we can command only whom and what we can follow.”99 In an interesting inversion of the owner-pet relationship, even today the musher is perhaps more dependent upon her team than the dogs are on her. No matter how much the musher wants to win, or to just finish, she cannot do so alone. Because collective success rests upon the dogs, the musher must understand the dogs. Hearne explains that the human being must take on the burden of understanding and teaching the animal. She writes of horse races, “In all riding competitions, the presence of the horse imposes a continuous, unique moral burden…It is like the burden of teaching humans, since the nature of riding is such that doing it at all entails meaning to do well by the horse.”100 For the team to function, the musher must be open to listening to and learning from the dogs’ perspectives. Thus, Hearne’s claim challenges the notion that, by virtue of our advanced mental abilities, human beings have nothing to learn from other species. 99 Vicki Hearne, Adam's Task: Calling Animals by Name, (New York: Knopf: Distributed by Random House, 1986), 76. 100 Ibid, 156-157. 67 An openness to a different perspective signifies a respect for the interests and needs of the other. Communication is vital for mushing because, for the team to function, mushers must understand their dogs’ limits. The point of reading the dogs is for the musher to know how to act in the best interest of the team. Four-time Iditarod champion Lance Mackey explains the burden Hearne describes when he writes, “My sled dogs are my passion and responsibility. I would rather be 10th than to be 1st with their spirit broken.”101 A central PETA claim is that mushers push their dogs beyond their limits. And, although this does happen, such instances are cases where the exception proves the rule. Instead, dog mushing is not the domination PETA describes, but requires a mutual accommodation of interests. This is apparent in another quote from Mackey. In an inversion of the PETA critique that mushers coerce their dogs, Mackey claims his role as a musher is not to force the dogs to pull but, on the contrary, to hold them back. He explains, “….That’s where I take control and teach the dogs to run with enthusiasm, but always within their zone of comfort and capability. Basically, I’m protecting them from themselves—especially the talented young dogs—by establishing a good, easy rhythm.”102 Part of what it means to be a musher is to understand the dogs’ capacities and respect them. Unfortunately, this gets overlooked in a presuppositional framework in which the idea of useful respect is itself incoherent. 101 Lance Mackey, The Lance Mackey Story: How My Obsession with Dog Mushing Saved My Life, (Fairbanks, Alaska: Zorro Books), 3. 102 Ibid, 110. 68 Diversity of Dignity: Animal Interests and Treatment PETA’s critique of dog mushing can be traced back to the way Western cultures understand respect. Respect is based in Kant’s definition of what it means to dignify a person. Therefore, the only way to dignify an animal is to treat it in the same way we would treat a human being. And, if granting all animals complete autonomy is impossible—especially because of the ways dogs and human beings have coevolved—the next best option is to treat animals as we would young human beings. The line of thought is essentially this: if we do not expect or ask anything of a dog that we would not of a child, then we are properly respecting (and therefore dignifying) the animal as the irrational being it is.103 This conception of respect is apparent in the fact that animal rights organizations, for the most part, condone pet keeping.104 In fact, organizations such as PETA appeal to animal lovers by framing mushing in terms of what a pet owner would ask of her own animal. Would she force her dog to live outside? To run multiple marathons a day in harsh conditions?105 The response is almost certainly negative. And, because pets—animals who are treated as human beings—are understood to be the epitome of a dignified animal, it is then assumed that animals who are treated differently are not respected. The Western critique of both the Inuit and dog mushers is grounded in the fact that neither group treats their dogs as human beings. Sled dogs, for instance, live outside 103 There is no question that asking toddlers to pull hundreds of pounds for thousands of miles is child abuse; thus, it is not hard to see how this way of evaluating our treatment of animals immediately deems dog mushing unethical. In fact, there is no room whatsoever for working relationships with animals. 104 Although, some animal rights advocates seek prohibit pet keeping, a view known as abolitionism. 105 People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, “Sled Dog Racing: Death on the Trails,” 69 and are asked to work. This leads to the assumption that the animals’ interests are not respected, which makes people uncomfortable with the practice. However, the Western framework’s singular and narrow understanding of respect is problematic. In our attempt to fit animals into categories inherently connected to humanity, we fail to acknowledge that animals’ interests do not always align with our own. What the Inuit recognized, which Western cultures struggle to comprehend, is that respecting animals does not, and in fact should not, mean granting them identical rights to those we bestow upon human beings. If to dignify a being means to treat her according to her interests, then with the multiplicity of functions comes a diversity of dignity. We should not treat animals as human beings not because they do not deserve respectful treatment, but because treatment that is dignifying for one species—or even one breed of dog—may be degrading for another. To understand how dignity can take a variety of forms, I first turn to Elizabeth Anderson. Anderson provides a way of respecting animals which does not seek to minimize animals’ differences from human beings and thus begins to accommodate diversity. Drawing from both Nussbaum and the Kantian notion of dignity, Anderson posits that animals have a form of dignity that derives from their place in the social world (a conclusion which is itself very anti-Kantian). Similar to the Indigenous emphasis on interrelationality, Anderson believes our ability to coexist with other beings, both human and non-human, makes beings worthy of respect and rights. She explains, “…The connection between having rights and the capacity to engage in a mutual accommodation of interests…I think this, and not ‘reason,’ in the more demanding sense of autonomous reflection on the validity of claims, holds the key to understanding why reciprocity is so 70 important to rights.”106 Furthering the connection to interrelationality, implicit in Anderson’s argument is that we need to move beyond the idea that all relationships with animals are necessarily unethical use. Similar to the notion of positional personhood, animals demonstrate capacities that make them worthy of respect. Importantly, however, these capacities do not derive from reason, but from relationships. Here, Anderson’s deviation from Kant becomes apparent; though Anderson is also interested in dignity, she does not believe the only way to dignify a being is by granting complete autonomy. Instead, it is only through the ability to have relationships that beings become worthy of respect and moral standing. In a further departure from Kant’s universal ethic, Anderson claims that our responsibilities toward animals are not uniform. Instead, both our obligations toward an animal and our treatment of the animal depend upon our relationship with that particular being.107 Anderson explains, “Hence it is not just rights to provision, but rights constitutive of certain kinds of social standing, that depend on an animal’s actual membership in human society.”108 Social standing is determined, in part, by the type of being a creature is, regardless of mental capabilities. To make this point, Anderson introduces the concept of species-dignity, by which she means the dignity that derives from a being’s particular position in society. For instance, Anderson argues, it is cruel to force a human being with Alzheimer’s Disease to eat out of a dog bowl and, in the same way, it is cruel to force a dog to wear a sweater. Even though the two may have similar 106 Elizabeth Anderson, “Animal Rights and the Values of Nonhuman Life,” in Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, eds. Cass Sunstein and Martha Nussbaum, (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 287. 107 For example, Anderson argues that only house-trained dogs have a right to live indoors. 108 Anderson, 285. 71 mental capacities (and neither is considered to have dignity in the strict Kantian sense), to treat a being as a member of another species is to take it out of its place in the social world. Doing so degrades the creature’s species dignity. The interesting implication of Anderson’s argument is that, if dressing a dog in human clothes is failing to respect the type of creature an animal is, there may be a way in which dog mushing is actually more ethical than pet keeping. There is something to this; while mushers do not treat their dogs as human beings, they also do not value them according to the problematic “So Like Us” scale. Instead, mushers, like Soiot hunters, respect their dogs for the ways they are different from human beings and for the abilities they have that other beings do not. Interestingly enough, one point upon which animal rights organizations and mushers can agree is that, contrary to the Cartesian understanding, animals are not machines. Mushers do not participate in the sport because they want to get from point A to point B quickly. If this were their goal, they would race snowmachines. This suggests that sled dogs are not defined by the function of the animal which can be replaced by snowmachines—the ability to cover long distances—but rather what the animals can do that machines cannot. Dogs are not an “in order to” in the way that snowmachines are, but rather a “for the sake of” that relates human beings to dogs through the world they share. Even with more efficient modes of transportation, people still choose to mush because they respect the dogs’ abilities and the feats they are capable of accomplishing. 72 Born to Run: Sled Dog Function and Flourishing While treating dogs as human beings is degrading in and of itself, a further issue with pet keeping is that the animals are never asked to do or be anything other than companions. Not only is the animal’s specific function and telos overlooked in the name of respect, but the fact that animals have capacities beyond leisure and companionship is forgotten. As Hughes writes, “…dogs are not simple. They may not be totally happy to languish in dependence and ease. The problem may not be that mushers are asking too much of their dogs when they lash them to sleds, they say, but that casual pet owners asking too little of their canines by doting on them like jobless adult children.”109 This is precisely Hearne’s thesis. Drawing from Aristotle’s conception of happiness, Hearne claims that there is something more to animals, meaning a capacity for a deeper sense of happiness and flourishing that comes from engaging in difficult tasks. In order for the animal to realize its full potential, and for us to realize the full potential of animals, we need to move beyond the belief that animal lives should be limited to access to food and fresh air. To deny animals the satisfaction that comes with fulfilling their function is not only to oppress the possibility of flourishing but may be a cruel degradation of the being. Animal rights organizations do not campaign against pet keeping to the same extent as mushing because pets, in theory at least, lead the best possible lives for domestic animals. According to Hearne, this claim is symptomatic of a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to be an animal. She posits that animal rights organizations mistakenly equate the foundation of animal rights with the lack of suffering rather than the pursuit of happiness; a confusion which limits and degrades the animal. 109 Hughes. 73 Her critique of such groups is straightforward: “…the problem with the animal-rights advocates is not that they take it too far; it’s that they’ve got it all wrong.”110 Animals do have an interest in leading comfortable lives, but they have more complex interests as well. Appealing to these further interests, which stem from a being’s function, is crucial for Hearne. She claims that the good life, for both animals and human beings, consists of ethical “…codes of behavior that urge us toward the sensation of getting it right, a kind of work that yields the ‘click’ of satisfaction upon solving a problem or surmounting an obstacle.”111 Importantly, Hearne believes animal flourishing and thus happiness takes place in the context of activity and, more specifically, difficult activity. By engaging in their characteristic function, animals have the potential to realize their telos and flourish. From this perspective, it is crueler to prevent dogs from running—to automatically assume that they would be happier on the couch—because doing so denies the animal the ability to achieve the more meaningful happiness that comes with flourishing. Through engaging in difficult activities, animals not only flourish, but also demonstrate capacities they are typically believed to be incapable of. For example, by learning and internalizing the aforementioned codes of behavior, Hearne believes that animals can display virtues. The idea that animals have the capacity for virtue is not widely accepted (or accepted at all) in Western philosophy.112 Although Aristotle himself 110 Hearne, “What’s Wrong with Animal Rights,” 60. Ibid, 60. 112 However, animal morality is a recurring theme in literature; for Hearne, one of the appeals of animal stories is that, in them, animals display virtues. A surprising instantiation of this phenomenon comes, ironically enough, from one of the most foundational works of Western philosophy: Plato’s Republic. In response to Glaucon’s challenge, Socrates uses guard dogs to as a model demonstrate the qualities the guardian class should display. “You can see [these natures] in other animals, too, but especially in the one to which we compared the guardian, for, you know, of course, that a pedigree dog naturally has a character of this sort—he is gentle as can be to those he’s used to and knows, but the opposite to those he doesn’t know.” Plato, G.M.A Grube and C.D.C Reeve, Republic, (Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co, 1992), 375de. 111 74 denies animals (as well as women) virtue, he does make an interesting connection between virtue and flourishing. According to Aristotle, the good is found in the function, or the characteristic activity of the animal. Thus, an animal’s function is what makes it both good in itself and good at particular activities. Aristotle explains, “…The excellence of a horse makes a horse both good in itself and good at running and carrying its rider and awaiting the attack of the enemy.”113 To use another example, the good, the virtue, of a dog is to run or to herd. And, if the good is found in a being’s function, there is a way in which fulfilling their function allows animals to display virtues. The interesting implication is that a flourishing animal can be understood as an animal with virtue.114 Hearne’s point is that, although we often believe we need to train the “dogness,” out of the dog in order to bring them into human moral society—Anderson’s thesis—dogs are already capable of their own virtue. Importantly, dog mushing provides the context for sled dogs to flourish and therefore display a unique set of virtues, including courage and the ability to withstand pain. Sled dogs are able to achieve virtue in a way pet dogs do not precisely because mushers ask more of their dogs. Difficult, uncomfortable activity is crucial for Aristotelian virtue because “…both art and virtue are always concerned with what is harder; for even the good is better when it is harder.”115 Aristotle understood pain to be an important test for virtue; a virtuous individual is distinguished by her choice to act for the sake of the good despite the difficulty involved. In acknowledging discomfort and 113 Richard McKeon, The Basic Works of Aristotle, Modern Library edition, (New York: Random House, 2001), 1106a19-22. 114 I recognize that Aristotle would disagree with this idea. However, I am drawing from a conception of virtue that is more expansive than Aristotle’s understanding, which requires so much knowledge that very few human beings can be virtuous. 115 The Basic Works of Aristotle, 1105a9-10. 75 choosing to continue anyway, dogs develop discipline and achieve a condition much like Aristotelian virtue. Hearne writes, “To say that pain is meaningful is simply to say that for the creature experiencing the pain there is something that matters more than comfort…something that is the ground of a certain creature’s being, what it cares about, toward which it is oriented in relationship to which pain isn’t quite pain anymore, not anything that matters.”116 Sled dogs find fulfilling their function more meaningful than creature comforts, which is apparent in that dogs are willing to subordinate their desire for comfort to this greater interest. The activity therefore provides sled dogs with a goal to strive toward—a telos—which pets lack. The difficulty of the venture proves important in another way: pain serves as a test for determining whether an activity corresponds to a creature’s function and telos. Just because an activity is in a being’s nature does not mean that fulfilling the function will be pain free—take, for instance, Aristotle’s account of human happiness.117 But if an activity truly corresponds to a being’s function, the pain will be subordinated to the greater satisfaction which comes from fulfilling the telos. On this point, a further issue with PETA’s comparison to pets is that sled dogs are a specific type of dog. As Hearne explains, “All breeds, or almost all, have inherent excellences.”118 Excellence is a reference to an animal’s function, which is not uniform across breeds. There is a reason 116 Ibid, 158. The acquisition of virtue, for Aristotle, is a distinctly unpleasant process. At least until one has become good—and potentially even after—virtue requires acting contrary to natural inclinations toward pain and pleasure. Aristotle writes, “For moral excellence is concerned with pleasures and pains; it is on account of the pleasure that we do bad things, and on account of the pain that we abstain from noble ones.” Ibid, 1104b8-11. 118 Hearne, Adam's Task, 219. 117 76 that the Iditarod is not run with border collies or greyhounds, and the reason is not simply that the dogs are not built for the cold.119 Just as herding breeds have the innate interest in herding—which manifests in the need to chase and order—a characteristic function of a good sled dog is an inherent desire to run and pull. As Mackey puts it, “I’ve always had the idea that a sled dog could run like hell, pull hard, and go fast for a long time.”120 This is not merely an idea: the dogs were bred for generations for their speed and endurance. That running is in sled dog nature is apparent in that one can train a dog, but one cannot successfully teach it to pull to the extent that is required for long distance races. One can attempt to coax a lab or a collie into pulling, but such efforts are unlikely to be successful because, in order for a capacity to be developed, the interest must be tied to an inherent function. As Aristotle maintained, “For if something is by nature in one condition, habituation cannot bring it into another condition. A stone, for instance, by nature moves downward, and habituation could not make it move upwards…nor could habituation make fire move downwards, or bring anything that is by nature in one condition into another condition.”121 Importantly, as Mackey explains, the musher’s job is to develop the dogs’ interest in what they already have a “hardwired” desire to do—to run—in such a way that allows the animal to fulfill its potential. The animal is not being transformed or asked to act in a way that is contrary to its nature; instead, a quality the creature already possesses is being activated. Crucially, 119 “While many non-northern breeds have been used, they usually have more problems. For instance, they may have trouble coping with cold weather. Soft-furred dogs tend to develop icy snowballs on their feet and legs. Many lack stamina or the innate desire to pull.” Miki and Julie Collins, Dog Driver: A Guide for the Serious Musher. (Miki and Julie Collins, Loveland, Colorado: Alpine Publications, 1991), 14. 120 Mackey, 9. 121 The Basic Works of Aristotle, 1103a20-24. 77 whether or not the animal has an interest in the activity it is being asked to engage in marks the difference between a violation and a furthering of the being. Mushers emphasize that even the ideal genetics—the biological hardwiring Mackey describes— are not enough; ultimately the most important characteristics for a sled dog and team is the dogs’ relationship with the musher as well as its desire to run pull. As Hearne writes about horse racing, “There are various ways to talk about what could possibly motivate a horse, or an animal, to such an effort. Fear certainly does not do it. Courage, joy, exhaustion, are more like it….”122 Only the love of the action can motivate dogs to push beyond the boundaries of pain. Dogs cannot be dominated or terrorized into pulling; the desire to continue forward must come from the dogs themselves. As Hearne puts it, “…getting absolute obedience from a dog…confers nobility, character and dignity on the dog.”123 Importantly, however, obedience is not directed toward the musher; it is a subordination to the task itself. The ability to act intentionally allows animals to mean their lives in such a way that bestows them with a bearing of dignity. That animals develop both physically and emotionally through training and racing is apparent in the way mushers such as Mackey describe their dogs. Mackey opens his book by depicting one of his winning Iditarod teams. Notably, the traits he emphasizes in the dogs are not athletic—these are implied—but rather animals’ virtue and nobility. As Mackey puts it, “…I couldn’t imagine a team with more honesty and dignity…”124 In an important departure from Aristotle and Kant, neither the virtues nor the dignity Mackey describes are derived from the capacity for reason. Rather, through fulfilling a function 122 Hearne, Adam's Task,160. Ibid, 43. 124 Mackey, 1. 123 78 while engaging in a strenuous activity, the dogs achieve an elevated condition. The physicality Mackey describes can be understood as a bearing. In a reconceptualization of dignity, Giorgio Agamben locates dignity in a bearing. Agamben disconnects dignity from rationality and connects it to physicality when he writes, “…from the beginning, dignitas also indicates the physical appearance adequate to an elevated condition…”125 What Mackey is pointing toward in sentences such as, “[The dogs] displayed that calm, indestructible confidence and muscled, hard appearance that comes only from thousands of miles of trail,” is that sled dogs have a bearing that comes from perfecting their function over thousands of miles, a bearing which is best described, as Mackey himself does, as dignity.126 Interestingly, because animals achieve this bearing by fulfilling their potential, dignity can be understood as a byproduct of flourishing. The implication is that, if animals are dignified through the difficult work required for flourishing, the degradation is not asking more of animals. In an inversion of PETA’s critique, the true degradation is not asking enough. 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