Jicarilla Apache and Hispanic philosopher. Indigenous philosophy, relationality, place, and refusing to let the West define what counts as philosophy.
Viola Faye Cordova (1937–2002) was Jicarilla Apache and Hispanic, and is widely recorded as the first Native American woman to earn a doctorate in philosophy. She spent her career on a question the discipline mostly declines to hear: what if the Western tradition is not philosophy itself, but one philosophy among several, with its own unexamined assumptions about what a person is and what the world is made of?
Her work puts relationality and place at the centre — the self as something constituted by its relations and its ground rather than as a unit that happens to stand somewhere. How It Is: The Native American Philosophy of V. F. Cordova was assembled from her writing and published in 2007, after her death. She belongs in this list twice over: for the work, and for what it took to be allowed to do it.