Indigenous Religious Traditions in Five Minutes - Molly Bassett
40. What is decolonization and what does it have to do with Indigenous religious traditions?
Indigenous Religious Traditions in Five Minutes - Molly Bassett
Natalie Avalos [+]
University of Colorado Boulder
Natalie Avalos is an Assistant Professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies in the Ethnic Studies department at University of Colorado Boulder, which sits within Ute, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Territories. Her work explores urban Native and Tibetan refugee religious life as decolonial praxis. She takes an endogenous approach to Indigenous life to write about land-based logics, the embodiment of colonialism as historical trauma, and the liberatory and healing possibilities of engaging intersubjective realities. She is a Chicana of Apache descent, born and raised in the Bay Area.
Description
For Native and Indigenous peoples, decolonization is both an end goal in the form of “land back”—the reallocation of Indigenous lands to Indigenous peoples—and the radical praxis that supports this end. A critical Indigenous studies approach to understanding Indigenous religious life serves to 'decolonize' by centering Indigenous epistemologies and assert them as epistemologies in their own right, as opposed to ‘primitive’ or superstitious belief.