Natalie Avalos: Comparative Indigeneities: Native and Tibetan Religious Refusal as Decolonial Praxis

Abstract: Settler colonialism monopolizes lands and resources, producing waves of refugees who become landless over time. Imperial projects led by the U.S. and the Peoples Republic of China have used a grammar of race to criminalize Native and Tibetan religious life in order to justify their dispossession. Both peoples are pathologized by these settler states as primitive due to their religion—as either having no legitimate religion or being too religious for the secular, modern world. Both peoples have faced imprisonment and “re-education” in the hopes they would abandon their religious worlds. They refused. I draw from my ethnographic research with Native and Tibetan peoples to discuss this religious refusal in transnational contexts as a form of decolonial praxis. In this sense, their religious praxis enables them to pursue metaphysical liberation and sovereignty in localized and global ways. 

Natalie Avalos is an assistant professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies in the Ethnic Studies department at University of Colorado Boulder. She is an ethnographer of religion whose teaching and research examine Indigenous religious life, land-based ethics, healing, and decolonization. She received her Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of California at Santa Barbara with a special focus on Native American and Indigenous Religious Traditions and Tibetan Buddhism and is currently working on her manuscript titled Decolonizing Metaphysics: Transnational Indigeneities and Religious Refusal, which explores urban Indian and Tibetan refugee religious life as decolonial praxis. She is a Chicana of Mexican Indigenous descent, born and raised in the Bay Area