The panel began with a short introduction of what Janet, Amy, and I (in this order) mean when we say “Inclusive/feminist approaches to Buddhist translations” and shared a list of questions to generate discussion for the audience.
Here is the audio of the session:
Listen to the audio here.
Long term readers of Lhakar Diaries know that Tsering Yangzom Lama is one of our founders. So it is a pleasure to share a video of us in conversation talking about her book, “We Measure the Earth with our Bodies,” and topics such as: the centrality of land in how we as Tibetans imagine and enact ourselves in the world, colonial dispossession, the coloniality of Tibetan Studies and the extractive nature with which some of its scholars engage Tibet/ans, theft of sacred Tibetan objects in the making of expertise and museums, intentionality in Tibetan Buddhist ritual practices of compassion and how its not about just the self but about all.
This conversation took place at the Jaipur Literature Festival in Boulder, CO on September 23rd, 2023.
“How do you translate intimacy? Recent news involving the Dalai Lama interacting with an Indian boy at a public event on February 28th, 2023 shocked the world. Over a month after the event, media everywhere ran suggestive headlines generating a firestorm of public responses on children’s rights and condemning the Dalai Lama as a pedophile. His guilt was proclaimed triumphantly as truth, but based on what evidence? A sharply cut video entirely devoid of cultural or geopolitical context.”
The following article appeared originally in The Geopolitics on April 25, 2023.
The first poem “The Young, the Holy, and the Wealthy” is one version of my interpretation from the many stories I’ve been told about how key members of a family, who had been identified for torture/prison/thamzing, were given fair warning from those whose loyalty the Chinese tried to buy but couldn’t.
The second poem “Here Vs. There” is something I wrote from my memory of listening to the elders talk constantly about how everything was always that much better or more abundant or brighter or bigger (even the ravens, as I recall) in Tibet. So it’s written from the vantage of someone who is about to set off for life in exile and has these hopes for how this new life/home should be.
The third poem “Wait for Me” is something I wrote from the perspective of so many of our parents and elders who had to leave their parents or children and loved ones behind as many of them had to make a hasty escape. However, many stayed somewhere close to the borders, waiting for their loved ones to join them, and not making the final descent into exile because of their belief too that the issue of Tibet would be a temporary one.
The fourth poem “Call to Arms” is about early life in exile when Tibetans in nearly every settlement called on their youth to practice ‘March Past’ every morning (with wooden toy guns) so that they would be ready if ever there was a war with the Chinese.
The fifth poem “Stone Bench” is about life in exile in the 1980’s and 1990’s when the longing for home (where the life they had left behind was home) was still palpable and a focal point of all conversations between the elders.
To my fellow Tibetans, what I am going to share today will trigger some of you and I am sorry. But we know all too well as a people who have endured seven decades of colonial dispossession and displacement in Tibet and in exile, that we have no choice but to be resilient and resist.
For non-Tibetans who are outsiders to our community and culture, and who don’t understand why the past two weeks have been so traumatic for us, I want to share few things we experienced and are experiencing as a collective.
How can we honor the complexities and challenges of our distant past without compromising collective experiences of the recent present? There is value in acknowledges the multi-dimensionality of Tibetan communities and the messiness of making communities in new places, without having to compromise the story of invasion and colonial occupation. How can we focus on what unites us as Tibetans rather than what divides us? Can we even afford such divisiveness at a time when it feels as though Tibet is experiencing an intensification of colonial incorporation and exile is stretched to its limits in diaspora with confusing political alignments that does not address Chinese colonialism?
The following is a video of the short talk I gave the conference “Future of Tibet” in Paris on FRIDAY 25 November, 2022. I share my observation on political developments within the diaspora community, the rise of Tibet advocacy in the governments of Canada and the United States through their parliament structures, and the importance of acknowledging the rise of and supporting Tibetan-Canadian and Tibetan-American candidates in the Canadian and American parliaments and the potentiality of their roles in facing China’s espionage activities on American and Canadian soil and advocacy on behalf of Tibet against China.
Interview for the Tibetan government’s “Tibetan Women’s Day” 2020.
Topics disused are: women’s leadership, notions of empowerment, spiritual liberation, gender violence, neoliberalism, colonial violence, exile, alienation
Prior to exile, Tibetan kinship alliances had tended to function along biological/affinal (clan) and regional (hometown) lines. As I show in this historical and ethnographic essay, the conditions of exile also worked to configure new kinship ties along national lines—communities in exile became family to each other, and in turn, the nation itself was imagined as family.
In exile, schools became key sites in which these novel forms of kinship and belonging were cultivated. In 1960, the Dalai Lama’s administration opened nurseries for children in exile that later became boarding schools (Dalai Lama 1991). Students from this school eventually became adults who sustained the next phase of exile for Tibetans escaping the policies of the Cultural Revolution that were imposed upon Tibet. Today, there are over 70 Tibetan refugee schools in Nepal and India that have graduated over 25,000 students. These educational institutions, which were developed, run, and attended by Tibetans, both sustained and fostered new forms of solidarity and citizenship that in turn bolstered the project of sovereignty-in-exile.
The following is video of a lecture I gave at UCLA’s (University of Los Angeles) Asia Pacific Center November 5, 2021, 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM (Pacific Time).
