Mutual Futures: A Conversation Between Krishnamurti and Deloria

Abstract

In this article, the author offers a reading of selected works by Jiddu Krishnamurti and Vine Deloria Jr., discussing their intersections and tensions. Both Krishnamurti and Deloria were public intellectuals fundamentally concerned with human liberation, but they approached that liberation in ways that might be perceived as mutually exclusive. This perceived mutual exclusivity, however, is often based in readings of Indigenous sovereignty as a project of recognition by settler states rather than as a project of refusing those same settler states. When sovereignty is understood as emanating from a relational Indigenous worldview, there is alignment within the thinking of Krishnamurti and Deloria and, more broadly, the possibility for a future of mutuality between Indigenous and diasporic peoples.

Keywords

• jiddu krishnamurti; vine deloria jr.; public intellectuals; indigenous worldviews; sovereignty; social change