March 13, 2025

Article highlights: 

  • What’s in your bounded space?
  • How does it shape you?

During an episode of the PBS program, Craft in America – Viola Cordova, philosopher, poet and painter and member of the Jicarilla Apache tribe- spoke of a concept she referred to as Bounded Space – a view innate within most Native American tribes.

“Bounded Space is the natural territory surrounding one”, she explains,  “the area defined by rivers, mountains, deserts, forests or oceans.  You have a relationship with everything within that Bounded space – the animals, the plants, the people.  Your relationship with that space determines your language, it determines your spirituality, it determines your concept of self, it determines your aesthetics and it determines what you will make.”

There are many reasons it benefits us to deeply understand this philosophy as Viola Cordova expressed it, I’m sure you can think of several implications of this that enrich your own life.  However, there is one reason in particular that I mention it here.

The statement points to the natural world as the formative world.  So the core of this wisdom can only be realized in our own life if we have a strong relationship to the natural world around us and have become deeply imprinted by it.

If our primary relationship with the world is mental, then it is our thoughts that become our bounded space.  If our thought space is relative to the manufactured world of human affairs – such as politics, religion, beliefs and opinions – then we have no steady ground, no wise view, no innate understandings from which to fashion our individual and shared worlds. 

What are your bounded spaces?  What are you most in relationship with?  Is it the constancy of natural spaces, the beauty and peace that is there?  It is difficult to build a solid life  in our uncertain times without being anchored to a stabile and beautiful bounded space.  

Viola’s words speak deeply to me and have brought me to deep reflection about the material from which I fashion my day.  What is my bounded space?  This is something good to muse upon.

Lovingly,
X ♥️ Mayet

PS – Further information about Viola Cordova, for those who would like to know more:

Viola F. Cordova, October 20, 1937 – November 2, 2002

Bounded Space – a concept presented by Apache philosopher Viola Cordova, Philosopher, poet and painter.  

Viola was the first native American woman to complete a Ph.D in philosophy.  

I have very much enjoyed her posthumously completed book: How It Is: The Native American Philosophy of Viola F. Cordova.  Among the many wonderful insights from the book is her statement, when speaking of the role of the artist, “The artist is a healer bringing us into harmony when we might have fallen away.”

She was a member of the Jicarilla Apache tribe.

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