Land, spirituality, and food. These three words speak to how Native North Americans and other Indigenous peoples conceptualize sovereignty. They also figure prominently in Asian Pacific American peoples’ quests to establish roots and a sense of home in diaspora, most often by becoming uninvited guests of Native peoples. This is the result of settler-colonialism in the United States – which, as Patrick Wolfe points out, is not merely an episode of American history but rather a militarized institutional structure that is continually reinforced – with force when necessary – to maintain political control.
What does sovereignty mean? How might Asian Pacific Americans serve Native Americans in pursuit of sovereignty while also reflecting on how their own occupation of Indigenous territories marks a complicity – perhaps inadvertent – with the settler-colonialist structure that enabled their migration to the United States along with their own educational, economic, and political successes.
This site presents open access materials for educators, artists, activists, policy makers, researchers, and others to think through and engage in dialogue on these questions. It also offers action steps for those working at the intersections of History, Politics, Religion, and Social Justice. Our goal is to offer templates for thinking creatively and dialogically in teaching and learning, writing and researching, worship, community organizing, and activism.
Trees
Water
Salmon
Homes
Farms
Project Team
Elisha Chi
Elisha Chi is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California Santa Barbara. She is a registered descendent of the Bering Straits Native Corporation and a descendent of Irish/British Catholics, raised on Duwamish lands in the anti-feminist radical traditionalist Catholic community of Seattle. Her interdisciplinary work seeks to articulate anticolonial academic methods and pedagogical practices that pursue Indigenous land return.
Eleanor Craig
Eleanor Craig is Postdoctoral Fellow at Emory University in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. They research race, gender, and coloniality’s entanglements with religion in philosophical and literary genres, and are invested in cultivating conversations that bridge religious studies and critical ethnic studies. They are co-editor of Beyond Man: Race, Coloniality, and Philosophy of Religion (Duke University Press, 2021) and special issues of Political Theology and Representations.
SueJeanne Koh
SueJeanne Koh is the Assistant Director for Graduate Futures and Research Engagement at the University of California, Irvine. In her position, she develops programming for humanities PhD students on professional development and diverse career pathways. She is also a writer and teacher in Christian theology and ethics who has published on academic contingency, Asian American and Reformed theology, and settler colonialism. SueJeanne is invested in building collaborations across educational institutions, religious communities, and nonprofit organizations to address social and political challenges, and sustainable organizational practices
Dana Lloyd
Dana Lloyd is an 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 co-editor of American Examples: A New Conversation about Religion, vol. 3 (University of Alabama Press, 2024).
Tammy C. Ho
Tammy C. Ho is an Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at UCR. Her interests include race, food, and religion; literature by U.S. women of color; Burmese and Southeast Asian diaspora; and medical humanities. Ho co-produced the video series Transformative Hope: Religious Responses of Asian American Elders to Racism (2022, with R. Jeung) and is the author of Romancing Human Rights: Gender, Intimacy, and Power between Burma and the West (2015).
Himanee Gupta
Himanee Gupta is a Professor of Historical Studies at SUNY Empire State University. Her interests include race, food, farming, Nature, land, and spirituality; South Asian diaspora, and social justice. Gupta is the author of Muncie, India(na): Middletown and Asian America (2018) as well as several articles, essays, and book chapters on the intersections of farming, land, and spirituality amid settler colonialism.