My name is emsenn, and I research and analyze relationality.
Relationality is a metaphysical and philosophical-mathematical framework grounded in Lakota epistemologies. Its central claim is that relations are ontologically prior to entities: things are constituted through their relations rather than existing independently of them. This is a precise formal thesis with consequences for mathematics, philosophy, ecology, and how knowledge is organized.
I am Lakota — the relational framework I am developing is an articulation of how I already understood the world before I had formal language for it. One of the ongoing tasks of this research is to develop that formal language without losing the ground from which it comes.
My current focus is research and writing, but this draws on a long experience of practice in the fields I write about — land stewardship, community organizing, digital infrastructure, and the ongoing work of living on occupied territory.
This site is a research vault: an organized collection of notes, essays, and formal specifications that develops the relational framework across multiple disciplines. It is built with Quartz 4 and maintained as an Agential Semioverse Repository, meaning the organization of knowledge here follows a formal structure derived from the mathematical objects at the center of the research.
If you have landed here because you are interested in Lakota perspectives on formal philosophy, or in the long tail of ideas at the edges of settler-colonial knowing, you are in the right place.