These papers discuss shamanism, Catholicism, capitalism, settler colonialism, boarding schools, and big ideas in diverse contexts including South East Asia, North America, and diaspora.
Despite centuries of displacement driven by imperial and colonial violence, Hmong Shamanism remains intact, relevant, and practiced across the Hmong Indigenous diaspora. This paper explores how Hmong Shamanism practices have changed over time in response to colonial violence, displacement, and migration. In doing so, I illustrate how Hmong Shamanism has repeatedly shown its ability to operate in different contexts by embracing continuity and change while still remaining relevant and intact even in a globalized world influenced by world religion. I conclude the paper by presenting a case in which Hmong history is Shaman history. Therefore, when we preserve, maintain, and cultivate Hmong Shamanism, we align ourselves with indigenous religious, spiritual, and cultural practices that will equip us to overcome existential threats, such as neocolonialism, white supremacy, and climate change.
How do we comparatively understand the authority of plants within the imaginary of indigenous rituals, Catholic rituals, and capitalist rituals in Sabah, a state in East Malaysia? I examine the usage of plants in a ritual, called momokis, which is traditionally used among the Kadazandusun people -- the largest indigenous group in Sabah who have been Catholic for a few generations -- for cleansing and blessing. I argue that this ritual envisions an world in which plants are kin: They are more-than-human persons to whom we are ethically obligated and who have relational qualities that we humans can attain through touch. I also examine how plants are imagined within the Vatican's authorized liturgy for Palm Sunday and in early 20th century capitalist reports by colonial officers. In both contexts, plants are valued insofar as they point away from themselves towards symbolic “abstraction,” whether that abstraction is money or the liturgical calendar.
On April 1, 2022, Pope Francis took what some called “a first step” when he delivered a historic apology for residential schools to Indigenous peoples at Maskwacis, Alberta, fulfilling one of the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action. While responses varied, Nehiyaw scholar Matthew Wildcat suggests that “The Pope’s apology may be just the first step. But perhaps it should be the last.” While Christian institutions played a key role in colonization, they have been superseded by the nation-state. In this paper, I theorize the process and implications of the shift in political authority from Papacy to Crown by mapping a genealogical approach to religion onto the imperial and colonial formation of Canada. In doing so, I excavate how the categories of religion and race are foundational to the colonial secular in Canada, which shapes the conditions of possibility for Indigenous peoples’ strategic acts and discourses.
This paper examines the prevalence of child death at St. Francis Mission School. St. Francis was an on-reservation Catholic boarding school for the Sicangu Lakota children of South Dakota’s Rosebud Indian Reservation, and was a key participant in Federal Indian Policy’s assimilative education agenda.
In their writings, staff constantly interpreted the death of students as a manifestation of the divine. This resulted in a “landscape of holy sickness and sacred death,” where death itself was a pedagogical exercise and a religious achievement for students, from the perspective of their teachers.
Through administrative and personal materials from the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions, this paper examines the culture of religious death as a mode of operation for boarding schools. It also suggests that recognition of the death-centricity of these institutions reframes events of run away and arson as a reinstatement of student agency, through the rejection of missionary authorized death.
For the Haudenosaunee, orenda is the spiritual energy that inheres in and pervades all things animate and inanimate in the world. A tree has orenda, a rock has orenda, and a human being possesses orenda. Any one individual’s portion of orenda is small. Yet each chief of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy carries the orenda of all those he represents, and the Grand Council of the Six Nations has the orenda of the entire confederacy.
The Cherokee are of the Iroquoian language. The rough Cherokee equivalent of orenda is Yowa. Yowa is said to undergird or uphold everything. The words themselves look nothing alike, but as Christopher Jocks said, they are related at the “big idea” level.
This paper will compare orenda and Yowa, as well as look at the oral tradition of the Cherokee revolt against the ani kutani.