Natalie Avalos

Natalie Avalos is as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies and Affiliate Faculty in the Religious Studies and Women and Gender Studies Departments. Dr. Avalos is an ethnographer of religion whose work in comparative Indigeneities explores urban Indigenous and Tibetan refugee religious life, healing historical trauma, and decolonial praxis. She received her doctorate from the University of California at Santa Barbara in Religious Studies with a special focus on Native American and Indigenous Religious Traditions and Tibetan Buddhism. S She is currently working on her manuscript titled Decolonizing Metaphysics: Transnational Indigeneities and Religious Refusal. It argues that the reassertion of land-based ethics among Native and Tibetan peoples not only de-centers settler colonial claims to legitimate knowledge but also articulates forms of liberation rooted in interdependent relations of power among all persons, human and other-than human. She is a Chicana of Mexican Indigenous descent, born and raised in the Bay Area.