Winter 2020 335 335 Accounts of grounded normativity in Indigenous philosophy can be used to challenge the groundlessness of Western environmental ethical approaches such as Aldo Leopold’s land ethic. Attempts to ground normativity in mainstream Western ethical theory deploy a metaphorical grounding that covers up the literal grounded normativity of Indigenous philosophical practices. Furthermore, Leopold’s land ethic functions as a form of settler philosophical guardianship that works to erase, assimilate, and effectively silence localized Indigenous knowledges through a delocalized ethical standard. Finally, grounded normativ- ity challenges settlers to question their desire for groundless normative theory and practice as refective of their evasion of ethical responsibility for the destruction and genocide of Indigenous communities. Metaphorical and Literal Groundings: Unsettling Groundless Normativity in Environmental Ethics Anna Cook and Bonnie Sheehey* INTRODUCTION The model of grounded normativity in Indigenous philosophy proposes an ethical framework that emerges from “Indigenous land-connected practices and long-standing experiential knowledge.” 1 Instead of applying theory to help solve problems on the ground, it attends to relationships to and with land in order to form a basis of normative evaluation. An understanding of grounded normativity explicitly rejects the groundlessness of Western normativity by considering land as a source of knowledge and understanding. This groundlessness amounts to a severing of ethics from connections to land and place. Attempts to ground normativity in mainstream Western ethical theory deploy grounding as metaphorical and not literal as in the case of the grounded normativity of Indigenous philosophical practices. This metaphorical grounding can be witnessed, for instance, in ethical theories such as Kantian deontology, which is grounded in a transcendental metaphysic, as *Anna Cook, Department of Philosophy, University of the Fraser Valley, 33844 King Rd, Abbotsford, BC V2S 7M8. Cook in her research considers the voices heard in response to public problems. Her recent work draws on social epistemology, Indigenous philosophy, feminist theory, and social and political philosophy to explain how settler colonialism requires a form of structural ignorance in order to function. *Bonnie Sheehey, Department of History and Philosophy, Montana State University, Culbertson Hall 100, Bozeman, MT 59717. Sheehey in her research draws on diverse methods of critique to address and challenge issues of racial injustice at the intersection of technology and the criminal justice system in the U.S. In addition, her work pursues the possibility of a form of critique grounded in hope to push the status and task of critical inquiry beyond its reliance on negative forms of judgment. The authors write this paper as settlers on stolen lands, specifcally the traditional and unceded ter- ritories of the Stó:lō and the Crow. 1 Glen Coulthard, Red Skins, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Min- neapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2014), p. 13.