The Bentall Lecture on Education and Theology: Critical Indigenous Theory and the Study of Religion

The Chair of Christian Thought, Dr Carolyn Muessig, Department of Classics and Religion in Partnership with the Calgary Public Library presents a lecture by Dr Paul L. Gareau (University of Alberta): The Bentall Lecture on Education and Theology: Critical Indigenous Theory and the Study of Religion

Abstract:
Critical Indigenous theory helps disrupt settler colonialism and the dispossession of Indigenous socio-political relations. However, discussions on the intersectional nature of religion falls short of a critical treatment. The problem is that religion is still understood along a teleological spectrum from institutional religion to traditional spirituality, i.e., from church to ceremony. It is vastly more complicated. Indigenous knowledges are framed by questions of religion (i.e., metaphysics, traditional spirituality, or lifeways) where kinship informs situated knowledges, worldviews, and governance. These knowledges are based in collective identity and co-constitutive relations between distinct human and other-than-human nations/peoples in a personable universe. Our work as critical Indigenous scholars of religion is to therefore centre relationality in our understanding and definitions of religion. This presentation introduces an interpretative framework called a hermeneutics of relationality that focuses on how “making kin” supports a critical disruption to settler-colonial definitions of religion in support of Indigenous relational knowledges.

Dr. Paul L. Gareau is Michif/Métis, born and raised in the Batoche Homeland in Saskatchewan. He is an associate professor and associate dean (graduate studies) in the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta. His research and scholarship focus on Métis Studies and Religious Studies; religion and relationality; co-constitutive identity; Indigenous knowledges/onto-epistemologies; nationhood/peoplehood relations; race, gender, and marginalization; and theatre-based, community-led research.

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