RPL Examines Relational Sovereignty and Indigenous Liberation

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SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School. 

SPEAKER 2: Relational sovereignty. Transnational Indigenous Religious Life as Decolonial Praxis. February 6, 2026. 

TERRENCE JOHNSON: Good afternoon, friends. I'm Terrence [INAUDIBLE] Johnson, Director of Religion and Public Life at HDS. And on behalf of the RPL staff, we want to welcome you to today's conversation with Professor Natalie Avalos, who will lecture on relational sovereignty, transnational Indigenous religious life as decolonial praxis. 

As we settle into the conversation and prepare to hear this incredible lecture by a colleague who's no stranger to HDS, just want to remind us that we are sitting on the land that was originally inhabited by the Massachusett people. We want to acknowledge them past and present in what is now known as Boston and Cambridge. We pay respect to the people of Massachusetts tribe and honor the land itself, which remains sacred to the Massachusett people. 

As many of you know, RPL really tries to provide an incredible outlet for understanding religion in its many contexts. And especially in exploring conflict and peace in ways to inhabit justice in the world. We bring together incredible academics, practitioners, and community leaders to engage in robust conversations around some of the most complicated issues we're facing as a nation and in the world. 

This event is being recorded. The recording will be made available on the RPL website in the coming weeks. Audience questions will be addressed at the end of the program as time allows. Please use the Q&A feature to pose a question to the speakers. 

So we're honored to have back with us Dr. Natalie Avalos, who is an assistant professor of Native American and Indigenous studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. She's a highly regarded ethnographer of religion whose teaching and research examine Indigenous religious life, land-based ethics, healing historical trauma, and decolonization. 

She received her PhD 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. She is currently working on her manuscript titled Decolonizing Metaphysics, Transnational Indigeneity, and Religious Refusal, which explores urban, Indigenous and Tibetan refugee religious life as decolonial praxis. Friends, let us welcome Professor Avalos to HDS. Well, I think you're muted, Professor Avalos. 

NATALIE AVALOS: Thank you so much for the invitation. So thank you for the invitation from the Center. Thank you, Terrence and Reem for all your help setting this up. I'm so happy to be here today. What I'm going to do is talk to you about religious life, Indigenous religious life. And I'm drawing from the first chapter of my manuscript. 

So I start with a story. I meet with Gregory Gomez. He's Mescalero and Lipan Apache. He's a veteran, a Vietnam veteran. We meet for lunch at Frontier. This is one of his favorite New Mexican restaurants in Albuquerque. We chat over plates of green chili enchiladas. His favorite. My favorite. He wears a baseball cap that says Native American veteran on the front. Semper Fi on the side. It signals his service in the Marine Corps. He wears bold silver and turquoise jewelry. This also signals his position as a Native elder. 

He is in his mid 60s when we first meet in 2012. He's an imposing figure at over 6 feet. Within the first year of our friendship, he adopts me as his niece. We meet regularly to talk about religious life. And honestly, we've continued to stay in touch since we're now kin. 

As a researcher, I began to study religion because I was interested in existential questions. Why are we here? What does it mean to be human? I also wanted to know what Indigenous knowledge and lifeways remain among Native and Chicano peoples who had been flung far and wide, who were essentially living in diaspora due to colonial violence, removal, dispossession. 

Myself, I have Indigenous ancestry from Mexico on both sides of my family. Both sides were estranged from their native lifeways and had become Christianized. For me, I think what was most important was trying to understand, how do people heal? How do they recohere? How do they come back together internally but also collectively after centuries of structural loss, psychic and structural abuse? 

As a researcher, I began to understand settler colonialism. I understood that it eliminated or sought to eliminate Native people by stripping them of their political, economic, but also religious power in order to monopolize their territories. As a result, many Native people are made refugees in their own lands. 

I went to New Mexico to explore my research questions because it's one of my own ancestral homelands, but also one of the regions in the US most dense with Native and Indigenous peoples. And so when I say Native peoples, I mean people North of the US-Mexico border. And Indigenous peoples, that can include both as well as those South of the US, Mexico border and in other regions of the world. 

In his book, Tradition, Performance, and Religion in Native America, Chumash religious studies scholar Dennis Kelley argues that urban Indians maintain their identity through the reprise of multiple forms of Pan-Indian or even supra tribal religious protocols. His work challenges the assumption that Pan-Indian or intertribal cultural expression is somehow cultural loss, or even a one-way street to assimilation. 

He helps us understand that cultural change doesn't necessarily result in assimilation. Religious life is core to survivance, or the interlinked acts of survival and resistance for Native people, because it's lived practice extends much further than singular experiences of the sacred. It's embedded in identity, culture, and place. 

For Native peoples who have lived under occupation for 100 years or more, 2, 3, 4, knowing who they are despite this is a source of strength. It's a source of pride. If anything, the steady cultural reclamation made among urban Native peoples since the Red Power Movement of the 1960s is often translated to more concerted expressions of Native self-determination. In this sense, Native American religious continuity post-contact is bound up with power. Indigenous religious life is political because it's linked to cultural resurgence, which is also linked to claims for sovereignty. 

My work ultimately explores Native world-making, reclamations of Indigenous ceremonial life in a transnational or urban context. I think about it as decolonial praxis. If Kelley's work demonstrates how Native identity survives in urban contexts, I ask, how does urban Indigenous religious life challenge colonial systems? How does it empower? How does it restore agency, personal or political? How does it help people heal? Beyond this, how does it facilitate the project of decolonization? 

Christendom's expansion into a settler colonial project developed a political order that pathologized Indigenous relational views as childish and superstitious. In this sense, their religious lives become targets for violent dispossession, loss, attacks. This is why decolonization has often been described by Native scholars, in particular, Lakota scholar Vine Deloria Jr., as necessitating a shift in worldview, or in his words, a return to an Indigenous one. 

In this sense, Indigenous decolonization is material. It's ideological. It's also metaphysical. As I learned in my fieldwork between 2012 and 2018, personal empowerment is linked to community empowerment through these revitalized networks of relationality and kin. I read Indigenous religious resurgence in this context as a form of metaphysical resistance. 

These networks are composed of human persons but are shaped by relationships to spiritual power immanent in lands. In this sense, Indigenous religious life fundamentally extends beyond the human to the more than human, or what Native scholars call the spirit world. 

When viewed through this wider lens, we understand how religious life tethers personal and community agency to forge networks of support, but also new polities. Despite the estrangement and loss urban Indigenous people have faced, It became apparent over the course of my research that their religious life doesn't just survive in urban contexts, it actually thrives. And with it, so do the decolonial possibilities. 

In this talk, I draw on a portion of my ethnographic research, specifically the experience of Gregory Gomez, who we started with, to illustrate how the regeneration of religious lifeways nurtured what many of my native interlocutors called Indian-way family. In this sense, it knits together kin for those who may be estranged from their immediate families and/or living far from their home nations. I argue that Indigenous religious life restores Indigenous ontologies, or relational personhood, that also views land in the more than human within it as kin. 

Here, Indigenous liberation relies on a transformed understanding of oneself in relation to a greater reality, where individuals see themselves as coextensive with all life in ways that ultimately express their sovereignty. In a Native context, nationhood is often understood through the concept of peoplehood. Peoplehood is composed of a common land-based language, sacred history, and ceremonial life. This is what has kept people coherent for centuries despite colonization. 

Here, sovereignty is relational. It's land-based. In this sense, it's contingent on honoring pre-colonial covenants, with the multiple, other than human, nations and persons within them. Over lunch, Gregory shares his thoughts on spiritual survival in diaspora, explaining that Native religiosity is not mediated by dogma, doctrinal guidelines like institutional religions. 

He speaks like a religious studies scholar when he differentiates his more normative understanding of religion from what he refers to as spirituality, saying spirituality to me is 24/7. It's not something you do once a week or twice a week or sometimes. Nobody can prohibit me from praying any time, anywhere. I don't have to kneel down. I don't have to bow my head. I just have to pray. 

We're free to pray 24/7. And that's the difference between religion and religious people and spiritual people, regardless of their belief system. That's basically the way I was raised. That's the way I tried to live my life, and the way I try and interact with my family. DNA way and Indian way.

Contrary to this popular assumption that Native people are vanishing, or even worse, no longer authentically practicing the religious life, Gregory illustrates how people continue to embody and express their ancestral knowledge. In this sense, native religious life is not reliant on texts. It's reliant on memory, practice, relationships. There's no central dogma, no central doctrine. This frees up practitioners to pray when and where they want. 

We also can see this when he frames a spirituality as a way of life, a way of being. An ontology. A collection of practices set apart from the binary of sacred or profane in the sense, it's primarily experiential. It's specific to peoples. It's specific to places. It also continues to be carried by people as they move. 

Kelley's work on urban Native religious life illustrates this. Some Native people retain an organic understanding of their traditional lifeways even if they become estranged from their nation-centered ceremonial life. It brings these forms of traditional lifeways together in conversation in urban settings. 

Gregory also demonstrates this by discussing how he learned about religious life from his parents and their parents. He continues to share these practices with his family, DNA and Indian way, meaning his blood relatives and those his adopted as kin. In this sense, it will persist and carry on. These practices will continue after Gregory is gone. 

Navigating religious life in diaspora is difficult for Native peoples, but, nonetheless, still accessible because it's a living system. Religious knowledge is ancestral. It's experiential. It's access through memory, upbringing, continued interaction with what many Native North American people call or refer to as the spirit world. We can think of this as the metaphysical realm immanent in the material one. 

In this sense, Indigenous religious life can never be destroyed. It's embedded in the land. It's embedded in the cosmos, as are we. The robust experience and existence of religious life, Indigenous religious life in diaspora, is significant because the war on Indigenous religious traditions is a historic reality. 

In Significations, Charles Long discusses the complex ideologies that birthed binaries, like rational and non-rational, civilized and primitive. Noting these dichotomies are fundamental to what he called the hermeneutics of modernity. In this vein, I think what de-colonial and Indigenous studies scholars to understand coloniality, or how the forms of asymmetrical power developed during the colonial period remain. 

According to historian of Indigenous peoples, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, white supremacy developed in a premodern Europe during the Crusades. In this context, quote, "the papilla of limpieza de sangre, cleanliness of blood," unquote, was determined by the Inquisition and became normative as the persecution of Jews and Muslims intensified over the centuries. The Spanish caste system this law produced would become a template for classifying peoples as ontologically distinct, due to their religion in the New World. 

Decolonial scholar Nelson Maldonado-Torres describes how 16th century Spanish settlers debated if Indigenous people had religion. If they had no religion, they had no souls, could not be converted or become rational actors of God. In this context, what Long referred to as empirical others are also ontological others. As a result, Indigenous peoples are perceived to have no legitimate metaphysical claim to their lands, no political autonomy. 

This assumed ontological difference was further legitimated through the Enlightenment within the anthropological concept of race, which deemed Indigenous peoples primitive and thus marked, and Europeans white. In this sense, modernity is grounded in conceptions of the human that, quote, "pre-supposed a racial division of mankind," unquote. 

Thus, Maldonado-Torres tells us that coloniality operates through ethics of dehumanization. What he refers to as a non ethic. Directed ontological others. Whiteness then could be used as a currency of ontological and epistemic power to seize and reterritorialized Indigenous lands. In the process, Indigenous lands and resources, which traditionally are understood as kin, becomes settler property. 

At the end of the so-called Indian Wars, US leaders turned to the task of assimilating Indigenous peoples into the American project. Once they were confined to reservations, a federal ban on Native religious life, or the religious crimes code, was implemented in 1883. As historian Clyde Holler writes, federal reformers believed, quote, "if all Indians were fully assimilated, the Indian problem would disappear," unquote. 

Here the perceived Indian problem was twofold. The state sought to eliminate Native nations, to permanently neutralize them as a political threat, and relieve its financial obligation to them by treaty. The elimination of Indigenous religious life seemed promising, but proved difficult. 

What continued to confound reservation agents was the medicine man's ability to manipulate the material world in ways that often proved true. Indigenous religious life threatened the metaphysical in this epistemic and political authority of settler colonial power. 

Soon after the ban, federal leaders invested in manifest destiny discourses would critique communally held reservation land as too socialist. Senator Henry Dawes decried their lack of selfishness, saying this is, quote, "the bottom of civilization," unquote. The 1887 Dawes Act would break reservation lands into individual allotments, selling surplus land to settlers. Here the view of land is relation, not property, posed a major threat to the greater political economic order of racial capitalism in white possession.

However, these examples offer us a solution. Indigenous movements are generally driven by the material geopolitical goals of decolonization. Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson theorizes Indigenous liberation as a project of resurgence. Entailing reclamations of language, lifeways, and relations. This resurgence, for her, counteracts feelings of powerlessness, but also what she describes as colonial shame. 

Her work builds on Taiaiake Alfreds, a Mohawk scholar who argues that Indigenous nations can restore their political power by first restoring their spiritual power. He calls for, quote, "self-conscious traditionalism," unquote. In this sense, it's a traditionalism that is consciously reconstructed from Indigenous ethics, such as respect for land in all relations. 

We see this in the life of Gregory. For Gregory, religious life is primarily about caring for your community, your family, but also all living things. Growing up, his family continually expanded whether to take in other relatives as immediate kin or to make close friends a part of the family. He says a fundamental piece of his spirituality is nurturing relationships. 

One ought to care for others as if they were your family. He says that's the way my family was. Somewhere in the late seconds, 40s, 50s, there was something that happened. Several of my aunties died from TB. Some other things as well. Some of their sons and daughters, my brothers and sisters, they came to live with us. 

My parents always seemed to get by if we weren't on the road doing migrant work. We always had that with us. There was always family and extended family, friends. That concept of family being family, that concept of people being family, I grew up with. I was taken in by a family my senior year of high school. For me, that was normal. That's part of my spirituality. For me, it's very hard to separate this. 

His family gifted him with stories, with love, but also belonging. They modeled a religious ethic that braids people together and holds them close. It enables them to brace against the tides of precarity that colonial violence thrust them into. This is what he means when he says his spiritual life is about taking care of others. As he said above, DNA in Indian way. 

After their dispossession in the late 19th century, many Apache people continued to live and work throughout the Southwest despite their bands being confined to reservations. Gregory's own family decided not to be confined to reservation. Instead, they traveled around the Southwest, Midwest, and South doing farm and ranch work through the mid 20th century. That meant he didn't have access to Apache ceremonial life that took place in reservation contexts. 

However, they made family wherever they went. He continued to do this as a young adult and then adult. Again, for him, spirituality exists and extends to all humanity. Not just what he refers to as the two leggeds, but the flowers, the grass. Quote, "anything that has spirit is understood to be a person, or have personhood, and thus deserving of care." 

This sense of relationality is a core Indigenous ethic rooted in an understanding of the world as interdependent. Lakota scholar Vine Deloria, Jr. explains that this interdependence is a perception of reality, an experience of living in the world as interconnected through a shared, quote, "fabric of life, in which everything had the possibility of intimately knowing relationships because ultimately everything was related," unquote.

Here, the material world is composed of an immaterial, sentient life force. This life force or spiritual power is the animating principle that gives life to all natural phenomena. Thus, plants, animals, and humans were understood as kin because they are also persons. They are endowed with this same life force, making them sentient. 

We can understand relationality as an ontology as well as a strategy of survival. Although Gregory was exposed to other forms of religion, he was grounded in the Native tradition, learned from his family, his grandfather in particular. He explained that his grandfather would, quote, "get on his knees or go outside and look up the sky and pray." 

Gregory describes a similar practice. He says, quote, "prays in the morning and at night, sometimes throughout the day," unquote. He's not praying to the Christian God, but to the larger cosmos. He asks for health and well-being for he and his family, as well as for guidance and protection. 

His religious life is shaped by this daily practice of prayer, but also spiritual power. An idea noted above, understood in a Native lexicon, is life force. But specifically among Apaches is [INAUDIBLE]. Among his extended family network, he learned how to practice medicine or assist in healing people, developing a gift for healing relatively young. He says, quote, "spirit leaves my body," unquote, to assist loved ones who need healing. 

In fact, he's known among his family and social circle as someone that can be called upon when they need prayer. Sometimes, he says, quote, "wills his spirit to attend to others." At other times he can just feel it going. And so he'll rest in prayer while it's gone. 

He says people often think of spirituality as this very complicated thing. They ask him how he does it. But for him he says, quote, It's very simple. It's intuitive response to caring for others. This spiritual power allows him to help others and carry out a responsibility to do so, instilled by his family. In an Apache context, diyin is sometimes referred to as just power, and is often associated with some of spiritual gift. 

Religious studies scholar Ines Talamatez explains that one is expected to conduct oneself appropriately in community life, maintaining one's balance in relation to the multifaceted world, other beings, corporeal and non-corporeal, and the landscape, in order to, quote, "assure the possibility of acquiring sacred powers, what Apaches call diyin, unquote. 

These sacred powers are important to develop because they're a source of sacred knowledge. When used wisely, they benefit the entire social body, the entire community. Traditionally, this power also served as a source of personal strength, nurturing one's connectedness to life. It follows that diyin is central to the formation of a fully embodied personhood, literally shaping individuals, through the relationship with spirit, into who they can and will be and thus what gift they may offer to the greater whole. 

After a tour in Vietnam and completing a degree in World religions, Gregory pursued a master's in social work. He settled in Dallas, where he would advocate for Native peoples as a social worker. He is most proud of the work he contributed to the Indian Child Welfare Act, which gave Native nations more oversight over the transfer of Native people from their homes to non-native families. 

He and his family moved to Albuquerque from Texas in the late 90s. His wife, an academic, took a job at University of New Mexico. Gregory describes his life in Dallas as one, quote, "active in Indian country," unquote. He coached Native Women's basketball. He contributed as a board member of many urban Native organizations, such as the Dallas Intertribal Center. 

The mass push to urbanize Native peoples in the middle 20th century through the federal relocation program provided an urgent need for new infrastructure to support them. The impetus to build Native-centered spaces was also an expression of self-determination among people that were fed up with being exploited and abused by settler systems. 

He noted that Native veterans who fought in World War I, World War II, Korea, even Vietnam expected their service would help them feel more included and respected. They were unwilling to put up with anything less. He says a lot of Indian men go to war, they come back, and all of a sudden they're not willing to put up with the bullshit of the racism, the bigotry that they grew up with, because they went off to war. They've been willing to lay their lives down and all of a sudden the same old, same old. That's when the National Congress of American Indians started, which still exists. 

Contemporary Native identity emerged in this time. Out of these cultural shifts, Native people from reservations began to move to cities in unprecedented numbers. But their intertribal relationships and sense of common identity had already began in the 19th century in boarding schools, which dotted the Plains, Northwest, Southwest, and Eastern seaboard. 

Boarding schools generated a sense of shared identity and sociopolitical disposition. The federal relocation program shifted large numbers of Native peoples to urban contexts, further shaping pan-tribal identity, but also the groundwork for refusal, a refusal to tolerate further racism and other forms of violence. Thus, among Native tribes, a growing awareness is fostered, where they as a people, with common values and needs-- that they were a people with common values and needs despite their diverse tribal identities. 

Intertribal centers were created to meet their needs in the city without their home nation infrastructure to rely on. These centers became what Winnebago scholar Renya Ramirez calls Native hubs or locuses of community outreach and social life. Gregory became a Fed in 1975, and so worked to expand many of the structural gains catalyzed during the Red Power Movement that had started years before. 

At that time and place, Dallas was teeming with Native people. He says, you have 240 different tribes represented there. They're coming together for all kinds of activities. We would support each other. I was president of the American Indian Center, the board and president leader of the Dallas Intertribal Center. We knew who the poor families were. We knew who the veterans were that drank a lot, got into fights, went to jail. We knew what their families needed. These centers were largely set up to address these issues. 

So what can we do? Have as many for real people and for real organizations that are spiritually based rather than material based, rather than just economic base. We need to recognize our differences. I mean, there are 19 pueblos here in New Mexico. The largest language group is Keres. We need to recognize that. We need to honor that. "But we also need to capitalize and build on the similarities," end quote. 

People like Gregory understood the immediate needs of urban Indians and helped build the Indian city that exists today. City life could be brutal. It made issues like poverty, alcoholism, racism, insecure employment, and housing even worse. While there are still tensions over who is not included, given there are those that are enrolled, those that are not enrolled, it was through these shared hardships, structural hardships that bridged the differences among Native people. 

In Gregory's view, these efforts were driven by a shared sense of relational ethics embedded in a spiritual perspective. Honoring relationships is a fundamental part of his religious life, but also as a common value here. The people that built these centers and spaces nurtured a sense of interrelatedness, a sense that an intertribal effort could support their mutual well-being. 

Gregory and the other urban Native people draw on the forms of traditionalism that they were raised with to build these structures. In the process, they build an extended network of kin. These refusals to assimilate, remain silent, or acquiesce to coercive power create spaces for Native Americans to envision new ways of living and being autonomous, as peoples in both local and global ways. Here, their intentional use of traditional values builds spiritual but also political agency among the social body. 

After doing this kind of work for years, Gregory started an organization called the Indigenous Institute of the Americas in the late 1980s. It educates non-native people on Native culture all around the world. They do outreach work to provide material support for Native people that may need it. 

The IIA is voluntary and self-funded. His, quote, "Indian-way niece," Lawnikwa Spotted Eagle, who was Western Shoshone and also a veteran, assist him in this work locally. For example, they may collect donations of blankets, clothes, books, monies, deliver them in and around the Albuquerque metro area, or even to chapter houses on the Navajo Nation. They seek to meet some of the material needs of Native people in their immediate and extended community, because it's an urgent need, but also out of a sense of spiritual obligation. 

These values are made salient on the ground in an urban context, where common dimensions of Native religious life act as a currency for indigeneity, such as participating in powwows, sweat lodges, being a Sun dancer. In this sense, it contributes to an intertribal lexicon of religious experience, but also protocol. As a result, religious life in the city is often linked to one of these three. 

Gregory began attending powwows in the 1960s, but never danced, because at that time, only certain tribes powwow. And one had to be initiated into the society to do so. He was eventually adopted by the Comanche and began to dance with them in their gourd dance. This is significant because it was his first opportunity to participate in a communal ceremony. 

While powwows may be read as secular by outsiders, Sac and Fox historian Don Fixico reminds us they provide an entry point for urban community cohesion, or what we can understand is intertribal relationality that extends beyond the singular native nation. He says the spirit of the dances revitalizes indianism rather than tribalism. Since members of different tribes attend, the cohesion of Indian to Indian is difficult to comprehend. 

It's psychologically important for Indians to identify with each other. "Security, commonalities, and tribal cultures, and self-confidence, have all motivated the unification of Indians in the urban mainstream while simultaneously mandating the retention of traditional social structures and Native values," unquote. 

In this sense, this form of togetherness creates belonging, which is a fundamental existential need that supports feeling safe and included in the world. While not all urban Indigenous peoples participate in these sorts of pan-tribal or intertribal events, some have become more assimilated. Some may seek to remain just associated with their families/tribal network. 

But generally, they act as an important cultural anchor. Gregory was later initiated into the Lakota Sundance tradition in the 1970s. He danced for 16 years, further cementing his commitment to serve other Native people. As his religious networks grow, so do the sense of belonging and relationality, which says, you're not here alone. You are kin. In this way, the religious sensibilities expressed by urban Native peoples heal ontological wounds created through the colonial projects. 

They address racialization, dispossession, displacement, what some scholars may refer to as historical trauma. In the process, these peoples are able to re-embody relational ways of being. They affirm their own humanity in the face of racialization. In this sense, religious life acts as a decolonial praxis. It rebuilds peoples from the inside out, but also their capacity to envision a life beyond empire. 

In these contexts, transnational and diasporic Native peoples create a dynamic transcultural space where their common experience sits in tension with people specific identities. This enlarged Indigenous identity is experienced or broadened framework of self, a self-embedded in the collective, one that is no longer a member-- one is no longer a member of a specific tribe with a specific metaphysic within a larger cosmos, but is now a member of a specific tribe, or even multiple tribes, a larger intertribal community, and a member of US society within the larger cosmos. 

Here we see kinship as concentric circles that spiral out, drawing those in diaspora closer together. Gregory says living a spiritual life is, quote, "critical to survival." He means that our human need to adhere to the rules of right relationship, help us live well, but also that extended kinship networks make that even more materially possible. I'll end here. Thank you so much. 

TERRENCE JOHNSON: Wow. Thank you, Natalie. What an extraordinary lecture. You really are a gift to us in a moment of so much trauma and pain. It was an incredible testimony of your own humanity and the humanity you're trying to bring to bear in this powerful manuscript. So thank you. I really-- 

NATALIE AVALOS: Thank you so much. 

TERRENCE JOHNSON: And I want to follow-- I'm trying my best to follow the tone you set. And so I really want to bring head and heart into the conversation to kick it off. And those who are on Zoom, please feel free to put your questions on-- as time permits, we will answer them. 

But I'm curious, Natalie, can you say more about Gregory Gomez as, on the one hand, potentially answering professor Long's notion of empirical and ontological other, and also the ways in which he's also answering this question around affirming your own humanity in the face of violence. It seems connected in very interesting ways that would speak to us as scholars, but many of us who are in pain. Can you say more about that? 

NATALIE AVALOS: Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I appreciate Long's framing because I feel like he was one of the first religious scholars in particular that really helped us understand that the world of religion is deeply interpolated by colonial conditions and the material realities, and that those conditions don't just create economic and social and political disposition. They create a religious disposition. And to view others as epistemic or empirical others is also to see them as having illegitimate knowledge, illegitimate religious worlds. 

And so what I appreciate about what Gregory is doing, and what I saw with a lot of urban Native and Indigenous people, that even though they had been raised in these diasporic conditions, they refuse to let them break their spirit. They refuse to let them feel as if their traditions were worthless or had no value, and that their knowledge-- 

Because if we think here that the relationships built with spiritual power, is ultimately a form of knowledge production, a means of accessing spiritual metaphysical knowledge, insight on not just the greater nature of reality, that ultimately it's interdependent and coextensive, but also that attached to it is a moral imperative. 

And that's something that the Lakota scholar Vine Deloria Jr. would tell us, is that there's always this moral dimension to attention to relationality. And so really, the work that Gregory and others like him are doing is they're living that ontologically. It becomes a way of life, a way of being. 

And it's modeled for younger generations and people that see, actually, we can carve out a space for ourselves, but we can also make a way out of these coercive conditions, which are not just demoralizing, but ultimately seek to make you feel hopeless. And so you really nurture hope. You nurture belonging. You nurture that. The idea that people coming together and caring for one another in the sense of mutuality, that is actually the core of power. True social, spiritual, and political power. 

TERRENCE JOHNSON: Well, that's powerful. Can you say more about this idea of the moral dimension and relationality? Because it seems as if this idea of what true power looks like to both transform structures, but also to transform this idea of who we are in terms of how we relate to plants to many ecologies around us. 

How do we speak to this in a moment, and to young scholars who in some ways have siloed Native traditions as, oh, it's over there, [INAUDIBLE] in opposition to other methods and approaches? So I apologize if I'm rambling, but I love this idea of the moral dimension to relationality. And then what does that say about ethics and about how ethics relates to how we use both power structurally and personally? 

NATALIE AVALOS: Oh, yeah. Thank you for asking that. What I love about this idea of-- Deloria would say, well, Native peoples, historically, have perceived reality that way, because you have medicine people, different ritual specialists have focused and sought to create communication with the spiritual world. 

And so you get this deeper view. You're able to see through the everyday material phenomenon, realize in very practical ways that we're deeply dependent. We could not exist without the air, without the plants and the animals. They feed us. They nourish us. All the resources around us, they house us. So our deep dependence is both material but also, again, spiritual. 

And so there's many origin stories in native context. But really thinking that these stories exist in every part of the world. That people have to be humble and recognize their sense of relationality is really one of reciprocity. We are given so much, and so we're then compelled to give in return. 

And what are we giving? One of the things that I love, Deloria would say, well, in the US, we're socialized to this rights-based discourse. And in a Native context, you're socialized to a responsibilities discourse. And that that responsibilities discourse helps us see that this is not necessarily just specific to Native peoples, we're all living under these conditions where we're being given. 

The Earth is providing for us, and what are we providing in return? What forms of stewardship, and care, and kinship are we providing. And I think in this moment where we see so much ecological crisis, it's a good reminder to recenter that value. 

TERRENCE JOHNSON: Thank you. And I apologize to the audience members. I had a hard time clicking on the Q&A. So we have several questions. And I want to begin with one person asked, well, can you speak more about the medicine man's ability to manipulate the material world in ways that often prove true to Indigenous life? Do you have any examples from your research? 

NATALIE AVALOS: So ultimately, Gregory is a great example of that, in the sense that when he started telling me about his ability to help people heal. And he would just explained, my spirit just goes out and helps people, and I can feel it. And that this started to happen intuitively for him as a young man. And that these gifts, depending on the tradition you're raised in, you may have a vision quest, or some specific ceremony that helps you explore what spiritual capacity you have. 

But if we think that you go into the world, or come into the world, and you're raised in an environment where you're told your intentions, your sense of responsibility and care to others are the most salient, important dimensions of living, that creates a integrity that you need to navigate spiritual power. So scholars like Inez Talamantez, who was my mentor, would say, well, if you learn to act with that level of integrity, then power may come to you because it knows that you can be a stable vessel for it. And in a sense, we see that with Gregory, that he's able to manipulate the world, in essence, help bring healing to others through the use of spiritual power with integrity, and fortitude, and care. 

And of course, I quoted from Clyde Holler's work. He wrote this book on The Sundance Band. And he has great descriptions there of these different medicine men that are able to heal people, that are able to know what's happening years in advance, prophesies. And have a sense of understanding what's happening even hundreds of miles away. 

So they have this deep insight that can transcend space and time. And I think part of what Indigenous religious life challenges us to think about is that the material world is actually much more akin to the quantum world that physics has started to describe. And so this linear concept of time is more illusory than we realize. 

TERRENCE JOHNSON: We have two quick questions I want to try to raise. One is around this idea of relational ontologies, this idea that they're diverse and distinctive, and at the same time at the heart of many different traditions around the world. And when we think about these relational ontologies in the context, or juxtaposed to what the questioner calls a European modernity. How do we make sense of this, because it seems to be an aberration, but you're actually pushing back in term that it's not an aberration. In some ways, it is enriching the conversation, but also pointing to what's been ignored, and, in some cases, violently eradicated, or attempted to be eradicated. 

NATALIE AVALOS: And I think that that's where we understand religious dispossession is such an important factor and component of colonization. So it tells you that religious power clearly was a threat to colonial power. And that these relational ontologies, they are specific to people and places, but we see them all around the world. 

And so part of what the modern project did was actually abstract your relationality. You become individualized, both through the religious project, but also through the project of racial capitalism, and really industrial capitalism. And so you have all these factors that abstract your sense of relationality intentionally so that you can be coerced into these systems. You're dispossessed of land, you're dispossessed of your ability to be autonomous on lands. So I think that there's a lot more for us to understand about the nature of colonialism, in the sense that they really sought to eradicate, not just autonomous political agency, but really particular relations with the world. 

TERRENCE JOHNSON: Wow, this is powerful. So we're out of time. But I want to very quickly ask you two questions Linda has asked. Can you tell us the name, again, of your mentor? You might put this name in the chat for us? 

NATALIE AVALOS: So my advisor, Inez Talamantez, she was an Apache Chicana scholar. And she taught at UC Santa Barbara. She was actually the first woman hired there in the 1970s. She worked with Charles Long, and they were great friends. And she was really the one that established the subfield of Native American and Indigenous religious traditions. She passed in 2019, just shy of her 90th birthday. And she was still teaching. 

TERRENCE JOHNSON: Wow, wow. And how do you spell her last name again, please? 

NATALIE AVALOS: Talamantez, T-A-L-A-M, Talamant-- Here, let me actually write it in the chat. 

TERRENCE JOHNSON: Perfect. Thank you so much. I apologize. 

NATALIE AVALOS: I'm so glad that people are interested. She has some great work out there. She did work on the Apache Girls Puberty Ceremony. And it's really powerful. 

TERRENCE JOHNSON: Great, thank you. So, friends, I apologize. We are out of time. But let us again, thank Professor Natalie Avalos for this incredible lecture. And we look forward to reading her book, and having her back when the book is published, God willing, in person. 

And thank you all for participating. Please join us in two weeks on February 20, same time, as Professor Paul Cato speaks on the time for a Black religious experiment, Love and Democracy in America's 250th Year. 

Thank you again. Let's thank the RPL staff for this incredible talk. And we look forward to seeing you soon. 

NATALIE AVALOS: Thank you all so much. 

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