Navigating the Nuances of Rethinking Indigenous Histories and Orality

Recorded: April 11, 2025
Event: Whither Global Antiquity? Retrospection and Future Directions
Citation: White, Kevin. “Navigating the Nuances of Rethinking Indigenous Histories and Orality,” Global Antiquity: Whither Global Antiquity (April 11, 2025).

by Kevin White (University of Toronto)

Indigenous histories and oralities must first be understood to be plural. Indigenous epistemologies, ontologies, and axiologies have been studied as representative of earlier humankind’s quaint understanding of the world around them juxtaposed with the established hierarchal constructs of Western Civilization. Even more, these knowledge and value systems were miscategorized as mere mythology when they are epistemologies and philosophical worldviews that vary slightly and greatly from Western theology, philosophy, and science. We must examine humanity’s placement, roles, and responsibilities in this natural world that contribute to our understanding of ourselves and our unique cultures. It is imperative to navigate the nuances that lead us to rethink Indigenous histories, orality, and communally held memories from the ancient past while bearing in mind the obligations to those generations coming in the future. When we re-examine these mere mythologies as worldviews constructed by our ancestors that married pragmatic and lived experiences to ancestral knowledge that is then bundled together for the coming generations, we have a unique practice of orality that conceptually is quite stable due to the allowance, and even encouragement of alterations and variation. I will show this rethinking through my research of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Cosmological narratives, the Salvage Ethnography period, and the research of Tuscarora linguist J.N.B. Hewitt. The Haudenosaunee are composed of the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk, and Tuscarora, who have traditionally and still live in what is now New York and Ontario.

About the Speaker

Kevin J. White (Akwesasne Mohawk) is an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Studies and Religion at the University of Toronto, whose work focuses primarily on Haudenosaunee Creation and cultural lessons contained within the narrative. White’s scholarship analyzes Tuscarora ethnographer J.N.B. Hewitt’s work on Iroquois Cosmologies. He is guided by community and cultural values and uses a Haudenosaunee lens of analysis; White looks to repatriate epistemological knowledge contained in texts by Hewitt and others. He is working with the Six Nations Grand River community, the Deyohaha:ge Indigenous Knowledge Centre, and Haudenosaunee community members, scholars, and researchers to elicit the nuances of generational thinking and how we recover our ancestral knowledge systems that illuminate our core value systems resulting in Good-Mindedness.