Decolonizing Religious Studies and Its Layers of Complicity

“Decades of work is all of a sudden viable and possible in the blink of an eye,” says CU Boulder Professor Natalie Avalos in the final moments of her conversation with RSP Co-Host David McConeghy. After last season’s conversation with Malory Nye that highlighted the colonialism and racism embedded in the European roots of the field of religious studies and its earliest forefathers, we continue this season with the perspective of a scholar of religion positioned within Ethnic Studies and Native American and Indigenous Studies. In her work on modern, urban Indians in New Mexico, Dr. Avalos highlights the need for theories that center the lived experiences and ontological realities of her interlocutors. These do not come from white Europeans writing a century or more ago. To uncritically retain these relics of our field’s past is to be complicit in perpetuating their structural and psychological harm as components of colonialism. It makes us complicit in that legacy’s ongoing trauma, so how do we break this cycle? What has changed that makes this work “viable and possible” today? Dr. Avalos shows us a way forward, one rooted in decolonial theories like regeneration that not only express Indigenous epistemologies, but also create moments of deep reflection for our students. She urges us to do more to make visible our hidden relations to structures of power. This is the work of decolonizing religious studies. If we aspire to produce transformative work — including teaching and scholarship that changes how we think and improves our lives — then we need to start with ourselves and the work we can each do peeling back the layers of our own complicity in sustaining colonialism’s vestiges. That’s the challenge of forging a more just and more rewarding path for our field’s future.