Category Archive: Uncategorized

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Tibet Film Festival Zurich 2025: Celebrating Tibetan Stories Across Borders

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I am still reflecting on the wonderful time I had in Zurich at the Tibet Film Festival, thanks to the Tibetan organizers who have nurtured this event since 2009. This was my first time attending, and I had the honor of moderating a discussion with filmmaker Tenzin Tsetan Choklay about his collaborative work State of Statelessness.

What I did not expect was how the theme of statelessness became an avenue for learning about the Swiss Tibetan community.

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When Tibetan Women Speak, Are We Heard? Challenging Etic Frameworks in Tibetan Gender Studies

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There is a growing trend among non-Tibetan scholars—primarily those from Western or Chinese backgrounds—to analyze Tibetan women’s experiences through frameworks focused on gendered roles, marginality, or violence in relation to Tibetan men. I have written about how such analyses often overlook critical and temporal factors, such as intersectionality (Lokyitsang 2015) and the historical and ongoing violence and marginalizing policies imposed by Chinese authorities (Lokyitsang 2017a). Moreover, these scholars rarely interrogate their own etic (outsider) assumptions embedded in their own analytics.

Within these frameworks, Tibetan women’s emic (insider) scholarly perspectives are routinely sidelined—especially when some of us turn the analytical lens back on these scholars to examine the power dynamics of their positionalities, and to critique their uncritical use of categories like “modernity” and “gender empowerment.” These categories, rooted in Western Enlightenment ideals, have already been challenged by Black and Indigenous feminist thinkers as embedded in white supremacist frameworks and serving the interest of imperial projects.

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Youth on Climate & Indigenous Futures, hosted by David Lam Center @ Simon Fraser University

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This public conversation brings Indigenous youths, activists, and scholars working across Nepal, Tibet and Canada to discuss Indigenous futures, climate change and solutions. Speakers ground the stakes of their call for action in the non-economic losses and damages in the face of climate disaster. This conversation centers around an article by speaker Dawa T. Lokitsang, “Are Tibetans Indigenous? The Political Stakes and Potentiality of the Translation of Indigeneity” to which speakers respond and discuss to consider Indigenous futures across the globe.

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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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Interview with Phayul Media, a Tibetan news platform in 2022.

I answered the following questions in the short video:

How did the Lhakar movement become a medium for dissidence inside Tibet?

Why do you think this movement struck a cord with Tibetans in exile?

Is a movement like Lhakar seemingly a milder medium and are they likely to become an alternative in the times to come?

What role does Lhakar Diaries play against the larger backdrop of the Lhakar movement?

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6 Poems on Life in Exile and Of Home from “A Thousand Parallel Lives” by Tenzin Pema Chashar

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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.

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Tsomo’s Speech at the Tibetan solidarity rally for HHDL in Toronto 4/26/2023

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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.

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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?