About the Event
An AAR Fall Fridays WebinAAR
Hosted by AAR’s Indigenous Religions Program Unit
How can we nurture greater respect, more nuanced understanding, more care-full critical thought, and deeper community engagement in teaching on Native American and Indigenous religious traditions? How can theories and methods from Native American and Indigenous studies offer critical interventions to responsible pedagogy, making any course in religious studies more responsive to questions of social justice?
The webinar will be structured as a conversation, with a moderator and four Indigenous teacher-scholars from various career stages and disciplines. Part of the webinar will consist of a workshop where audience members can share sample syllabi (and their challenges) and brainstorm revisions. This webinar is connected to a textbook the panelists are working on (under contract with Routledge with submission date this summer) on Native American and Indigenous religions.
AAR Fall Fridays is a webinAAR series that will highlight the scholarship coming from our varied AAR program units. This series — part of our larger year-round programming initiative — aims to bring the scholarship of our program units to the wider AAR membership and make it accessible outside of the Annual Meeting. These webinAARs will take place at 12:00 noon ET on Fridays and run from late September up until the in-person Annual Meeting in November.
Event Guidelines
Please note: AAR membership is not required to register for this event. In order to register, you will need to login or create an account if you don’t already have one. Creating an account is free, quick and easy and enables us to let you know about related upcoming events.
For assistance, please view our video walkthrough. You can adjust the playback speed on the video next to the closed caption icon. If you still have questions, please contact us.
Panelists
Paul Gareau is Michif-French/Métis and an associate professor and associate dean (Graduate Studies) in the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta. His research focuses on Indigenous studies and religious studies, co-constitutive identity-ies, nationhood/peoplehood relations, and relationality and religion.
Natalie Avalos is an assistant professor in the Ethnic Studies department at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is currently working on her manuscript titled Decolonizing Metaphysics: Transnational Indigeneities and Religious Refusal, which explores urban Indigenous and Tibetan refugee religious life as decolonial praxis. She is a Chicana of Mexican Indigenous descent, born and raised in the Bay Area.
Elisha Chi is an Andrew Mellon President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Religious Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara. Her work explores the nexus of religious studies and Indigenous studies through the lenses of Catholic history and practice, federal Indian boarding schools, and Indigenous Land return initiatives.
Nanea Renteria is a PhD candidate in the Religion Department at Columbia University. Her dissertation, Peyote Women: Gender, Healing, and Power, uses archival and oral history methods to examine the ongoing ramifications of late 19th century frontier violence and assimilation policies on the religious lifeways of western Oklahoma tribes. Her work highlights the creativity, determination, and healing practices of Indigenous communities who, when faced with state repression, orient toward the sacred.
Moderator
Dana Lloyd is Assistant Professor of Global Interdisciplinary Studies and Affiliated Faculty at the Center for Peace and Justice Education at Villanova University. She is the author of Land Is Kin: Sovereignty, Religious Freedom, and Indigenous Sacred Sites (University Press of Kansas 2023) and the editor of the forthcoming book, Native American Religions: Teaching and Learning on Stolen Land (Routledge 2026).