Resistance and Resilience: Macintyre's Communitarianism and the Cherokee Tribal Tradition

Dissertation, University of Minnesota (2000)
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Abstract

As one who had been raised with a keen sense of belonging ---to a tribe, in a church, I dedicated my dissertation to exploring and expanding the work of Alasdair MacIntyre. MacIntyre's concepts of tradition and epistemological crisis resonate with my experience of communities. However, a consideration of a Native American tradition reveals that MacIntyre's criteria for success or failure of epistemological crisis are too narrowly drawn. I argue that the experience of the Cherokee tribe through the transitions of the nineteenth century reveals a measure that MacIntyre misses in his consideration of his case studies: a tradition's power of resiliency through epistemological crises. While my study offers a useful critique to MacIntyre's work, and contributes to the discussion of communitarianism, a more fundamental purpose of this dissertation is to pose a Native American perspective which enriches political philosophy by broadening its horizons to include indigenous voices and writings. ;The work is arranged in three parts. First, I explore MacIntyre's conceptions of tradition and epistemological crisis, placing MacIntyre's work in the context of communitarian theory. The second part comprises my narrative of the Cherokee tradition from the late 1700s through the 1800s. I consider in particular two points of epistemological crisis: the move to written law in 1808, and the imposition of the Dawes Act in the 1890s. Finally, I draw upon the contemporary Cherokee tradition to explore the conception of resiliency that this case study contributes to MacIntyre's notions of traditions and epistemological crisis. I argue, in the end, that MacIntyre's understanding of traditions and epistemological crisis---and the truth that emerges from the latter---need development if he wishes to include an indigenous perspective

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