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Exploring Tibetan Indigeneity in the Context of Globalizing Settler Colonialism, talk @ U of British Columbia (2024)

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Thank you to the Department of Asian Studies’ Himalaya Program, Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies, and School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia for hosting my November 22, 2024 talk.

Based on the article “Are Tibetans Indigenous?”, this presentation examined how North American settler-colonialism literature might complicate our understanding of relationships between Asian nation-states and their ‘Indigenous’ populations. The talk included a Q&A session.

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Understanding Asian Settler-Colonial Imperialisms and Indigeneities, China in Tibet

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From the article: Are Tibetans Indigenous? The Political Stakes and Potentiality of the Translation of Indigeneity

How does settler-colonial imperialism operate in Asia, and what are the ways in which Asian Indigeneities become mobilised? To address this question, in 2017, I brought together scholars who are observing various settler-colonial and imperial dynamics and developments across Asia for a panel discussion titled ‘Asian Settler-Colonialisms and Indigeneities’ at the 116th annual American Anthropological Association conference. At that time, scholarly considerations about Asian land and resource extraction emphasised capitalism, development, and governmentality, with scant consideration of settler colonialism, even though the last remains a vital framework for understanding the structural nature of imperial projects (Wolfe 2006). Even the literature that adopted this frame drew its analysis primarily from Euro-American–centred examples, implicitly suggesting that settler colonialism is an innately Western phenomenon (Pels 1997). Yet, capitalist developments with imperial consequences continue to impact Asia at varying scales (Tsing 2005). Such contemporary developments, alongside long Asian imperial histories, including those of China, Japan, and India, complicate this assumption. This provokes questions such as: How does settler domination work when those involved in it are neither white nor from the West? How can we critically engage with this while not Orientalising this history as a cultural peculiarity or delinking it from the deep influence of Western empires?

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The Dalai Lama’s Future Succession: Understanding the 14th Dalai Lama and His Formidable Contributions, a keynote lecture by Dr. Dawa Lokyitsang

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This keynote lecture by Dr. Dawa Lokyitsang on “The Dalai Lama’s Future Succession: Understanding the 14th Dalai Lama and His Formidable Contributions” with responses from Tenzin Dorjee (Columbia University), Cameron Warner (Aarhus University), and Nicole Willock (Old Dominion University) took place on September 13, 2024 at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Department of Anthropology. This lecture is part of the Leadership and Reincarnation of the Dalai Lamas Project (LEAD): A Research Network on Succession, Innovation, and Community.

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What is Lhakar? How did Lhakar Diaries Begin?

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The following is a short interview I did with Phayul Media, the popular Tibetan news platform based in Dharamsala, India, in the summer of 2022 (they published it a year later in 2023).… Continue reading →

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On translation with Janet Gyatso, Dawa Lokyitsang, & Amy Langenberg, and the importance of Listening

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This panel workshop on Translation at Northwestern University 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.

The audio of the session is available for listening.

I also suggest we practice active listening and be aware of our own and other’s gendered, racialized, and classed positionalities if we truly want Tibetan women to be part of the conversation in white-dominated spaces.

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Tsering Yangzom Lama, Dawa Lokyitsang and Natalie Avalos at Jaipur Lit Festival

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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.

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The Geopolitical Violence of Translating the Dalai Lama

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“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.

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In honor of the 13th Dalai Lama’s proclamation of Independence: Neglecting the invasion of Tibet in analysis of early exile as ‘Geluk Hegemony’

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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?

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Future of Tibet: Thoughts and Observations

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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.

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Interview on Gender and Leadership in the Tibetan Exile Community

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Interview for the Central Tibetan Administration’s (or the Tibetan government in exile) “Tibetan Women’s Day” 2020 in Dharamsala, India.

Topics disused: women’s leadership, notions of empowerment, spiritual liberation, gender violence, neoliberalism, colonial violence, exile, alienation