Can it be ethical for a Western philosopher to write about Indigenous philosophies?

Philosophising across paradigms can be problematic. It has not only been guilty of perpetuating injustice, of contributing to unhelpful forms of meaning-making, and of failing to result in useful contribution in the past: fault lines potentially giving rise to these outcomes can be shown to continue to exist. Some of these fault lines reveal themselves to be all the more serious as engagement deepens. How, then, can it be ethical for a Western philosopher to write about Indigenous philosophies? This paper argues that while a family resemblance of necessary prerequisites to potentially fruitful engagement does appear to exist, these cannot be conceived to be sufficient: under a participationalist paradigm, a vital further ingredient must be an expectation of the emergence of the unexpected as agency moves into relationship. Within this dynamic, it is then not exclusively responsiveness in relationship between human philosophers representing each paradigm which is likely to play a role. It is, over and above this, post-Enlightenment Western learning to re-engage in shared becoming in inter-species kinship in our own localities (in the author's case, in the United Kingdom) which is going to be required. In a dynamic of co-creative shared becoming, it cannot be appropriation of another group's propositional knowledge which is going to be helpful: it is the courage, if we can muster it, to begin to learn from Indigenous philosophers some dynamics of sensitisation to our own localities' variations on underlying signature tunes, in order to fall into harmony with these as we co-create tomorrow's. Once we relearn to approach our philosophical engagement as an inter-species process of shared becoming, hope may emerge of our becoming better citizens where we are, as well as better neighbours to those affected elsewhere by our overgrazing of the world's climate commons. In and through this, hope may then arise of our emerging as skillful partners in philosophising across paradigms.