We invited contributors to the new book Native American Religions: Teaching and Learning on Stolen Land to share their reflections on the future of Native American and Indigenous political theology.
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On October 5, 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump renewed the push for the Ambler Road project. Ignoring environmental impact findings and the input of local Alaska Native tribes, his administration will allow federal lands to be used for the route and invest $35.6 million from taxpayers into the mining corporations at the heart of the initiative.
The proposed Ambler Road project starkly demonstrates the irresponsibility of the U.S. national parks system. These huge swaths of land, stolen from Indigenous peoples to ostensibly protect and preserve magnificent landscapes, are as vulnerable to the ongoing fascist reality of settler colonialism as Indigenous Lands have always been. Indeed, federal lands are not protected from extractive desecration; the US constitution primarily protects the rights of white men. The gospel of social and moral progress is a myth.
Indigenous political theology refutes the myth of progress in its embrace of refusal, (re)mapping, (re)riting, and (re)storying. Such non-linear approaches enact decolonial futurity, theoretically and materially. They arise in the ongoing struggle against white supremacy and in the beauty of the everyday. They are not the work of one, but the work of many, taking many different approaches.
This is the future of Native American and Indigenous political theology.
Elisha Chi is an incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California San Diego.
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As the illusion of American democracy continues to crumble, we as scholars are better able to see the raw settler colonial violence that has been exacted on Indigenous peoples and lands for centuries. Native American and Indigenous political theology must reckon with this political moment as a potentially fruitful one. Although asymmetrical power is less obscured, an intersectional, decolonial class consciousness still struggles to emerge. Scholars can take this opportunity to explore what it means to support Native and Indigenous movements for sovereignty, for instance, by investigating how non-Indigenous people can build relations with Native and Indigenous peoples in ways that amount to a decolonial future. Or how we can deepen our analysis of relationality as both a lived ontology and set of land-based ethics. In addition, we must continue to interrogate the ways settler logics of elimination have fractured our social world through white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and the myth of development. Ultimately, this is a potent moment to further dismantle the illusion that settler colonialism is immutable or even inevitable by envisioning a very different way to live with the land and one another.
Natalie Avalos is Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder.
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The intersection between religion and politics is different in Canada than in the United States. According to the 2021 Canadian census, while Christianity is still the largest religion in the country, at 63.2%, only 54% of Canadians said religion was somewhat or very important in their day-to-day life, and 26.3% reported no religion whatsoever.
The biggest issue facing Indigenous peoples in Canada when it comes to religion and spirituality is the backlash caused by the 2025 decision of the Supreme Court of British Columbia in Cowichan Tribes v. Canada. This case has to do with the Province of British Columbia’s past refusal to sign treaties with First Nations. As such, it never dealt with Aboriginal title and is currently negotiating modern treaties or dealing with land claims. Until recently, fee simple title (standard private ownership) was explicitly excluded from this process, but the Cowichan decision clearly states fee simple title can co-exist with Aboriginal title.
What exactly this ruling means is still unclear, but many people are concerned about it. The decision has served as a rallying point for those who would end reconciliation efforts, Aboriginal rights, and treaty rights. This is a call to end anything deemed Indigenous, even if it has nothing to do with Aboriginal title or the Cowichan case.
Daniel Sims is Associate Professor of First Nations Studies at the University of Northern British Columbia.
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As a descendant of settlers with mixed European heritage, I am concerned with non-Native appropriation of Indigenous religious practices and material culture – and not just physical acts of appropriation such as acquiring goods based on ideas stolen from Native people. An important and often overlooked issue is that acts of appropriation further narratives about Native communities that may very well be unmoored from history, politics, and especially the self-determined narratives that communities wish to promote about themselves. When the broader public holds inaccurate views about Native communities, it is harder for non-Natives to listen to, learn from, and appreciate Indigenous perspectives.
Moving forward, I see two trends continuing. One is the trend of outsiders diminishing Indigenous perspectives to the political detriment of Native nations. Supersessionist narratives justifying Euro-American conquest of Native lands pervade public discourse. We can see this in the current US administration’s valorization of Andrew Jackson, the US president who flouted Congress when he ordered Southeastern Native nations to leave their homelands in the Trail of Tears. Native Americans were only granted full US citizenship in 1924 – by the nation founded on their own lands. Federal authorities have cited the status of Native Americans in their recent attacks on birthright citizenship; relatedly, and alarmingly, Native Americans have been targeted during recent ICE raids. We can also see this disregard for Indigenous perspectives in the rollback of protections of Native sacred sites, such as Chaco Canyon.
At the same time, there has been a growing trend of wider interest in, acceptance of, and amplification of Indigenous expressive culture and ways of knowing. National and international scientific bodies are increasingly recognizing the contributions of traditional Indigenous environmental knowledge to science. Indigenous authors and artists are gaining broader recognition for their phenomenal work. More Indigenous leaders are entering electoral politics. In April 2026, a Canadian astronaut brought a piece of Indigenous knowledge with him on Artemis II’s record-breaking flight around the moon. With all of this in mind, I expect that there will continue to be more avenues for non-Natives to ethically engage with Indigenous ways of knowing and to support Indigenous nations on their own terms. The sky’s the limit.
Sarah Dees is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Iowa State University.
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I do not fancy myself a visionary of any kind. To describe the future of indigenous political theology would presume that we know what political theology is, what distinguishes it from any number of other fields or objects of study, and, relatedly, that we can adequately say what we think the indigenous is and that this description carries a stable meaning across its uses.
Who is using “indigenous” and “political theology”? When and why? What is their relationship with the constellations of other terms and ideas alongside and against which they are being articulated? What does this tell us about the religious, political, historical, and philosophical backgrounds of the individuals and epistemic communities of which they are a part (or which their enunciations help to generate) and who are mobilizing the terms?
Are the ideas that might call themselves (or even more challengingly, which we would call) Diné political theology in 2026 the same as Andean political theologies? Would these be the same if we located comparable enunciations of them, somehow, in the nineteenth century? Or the seventeenth? What about the explicit Christianities of, say, Samson Occom or William Apess? Are they “indigenous,” Christian, neither, or both? In what ways are these (if at all) related to, say, recent Israeli and Palestinian claims to “indigeneity” and what might be called their respective politico-theological modalities?
The impossibility of answering the question of “the future of indigenous political theology,” in other words, is also the generative challenge of that concept.
Timothy Vasko is Assistant Professor of Religion and Human Rights at Barnard College, Columbia University.
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Indigenous religious traditions show us that another world is possible. Our teachings are grounded in respect for life and that which provides life: the earth, the waters, the air, and the more-than-human creatures that walk alongside us. In this moment of “psychedelic renaissance,” as the public’s interest in psychoactive substances (many of which are derived from plants) is increasing, we should pause for a moment to consider what we can learn from the Indigenous stewards of sacred plants.
Healing, wholeness, and well-being cannot be purchased, no matter how promising it might sound. Nor does healing happen in isolation. It is not about feeling better so you can function optimally at work. Instead, healing is about restoring human beings to interconnected webs of relationship with our kin in the world around us, relationships that have been disfigured through processes of colonization and violence. Everyone suffers from the malignancies that have their most concentrated manifestations in war, enslavement, and empire-building — including the perpetrators. We need all people, including non-Native people, to wake up to our collective kinship with each other and with the elements that comprise life on this planet. One doesn’t need plant medicine to understand this, although we could begin to take direction from Indigenous plant stewards: We must learn to walk gently on this earth.
Nanea Renteria is a PhD candidate in the Department of Religion at Columbia University.
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Indigenous philosophical, ceremonial, and governance systems predate settler nation-states in the Americas. Their relational frameworks are shaped by intimate connections to the lands and waters that have sustained their people for thousands of years. Indigenous ways of being and knowing are also impacted by relationships to neighboring Indigenous nations, peoples of the African diaspora, settlers, and migrants. Relations with others have not destroyed Indigenous nations but have transformed them to varying degrees.
A prominent narrative in California is that the Spanish Catholic missions were the end of California Indians. California Indian scholars such as Charles A. Sepulveda (Tongva and Acjachemen) have described the mission system as Native alienation – a process by which Native peoples were removed from land, culture, community, and ceremony to work as slave labor for the Spanish Empire. At the same time, other scholars have pointed to the creative continuity of California Indians within the mission system. For example, Jonathan Cordero (Ramaytush Ohlone/Chumash) examines how pre-contact Indigenous political leadership and intertribal alliances continued within the mission system. Work by scholars such as Martin Rizzo-Martinez, Lee Panich, and Tsim D. Schneider (Coast Miwok) theorizes the dynamic ways that California Indians maintained relationships to homeland, culture, and one another even as they existed in a system that worked to destroy these connections.
The mission system has ended, and California tribal nations are still here. Many survivors of the missions persist, with or without federal recognition as tribal nations. Their relationships to homeland continue. Through long-term coalitional organizing with environmentalists, Native nations, and settler allies, the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band have worked to protect Juristac, an important ceremonial site in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, from a proposed 403-acre sand and gravel mine. In January 2026, the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band announced acquisition of 2,284 acres of this site through partnership with Peninsula Open Space Trust.
Future scholarship and community-based work on Indigenous political theology can examine and uplift similar narratives of continuity and persistence. This persistence, what Ojibwe scholar Gerald Vizenor famously described as survivance (survival and resistance), invites all of us to consider our relationship to the place we call home and to work toward the restoration of land and sovereignty to the original peoples of that place.
Abel R. Gomez is Assistant Professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies at San José State University.
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As a non-Indigenous scholar, my attempt to answer this question sits in some tension with my position and the terms of the question itself. The future of Native American and Indigenous political theology must remain accountable to and grounded in Indigenous sovereignties, intellectual traditions, and lived realities. These are nation-specific practices of self-determination and relational responsibility. What I can offer, instead, is a reflection on how queer and Indigenous epistemologies converge around a shared commitment to relationality as an ethical and political framework.
Many Indigenous ways of knowing and doing are embedded in place-based relations among humans and other-than-human beings, where kinship extends beyond the anthropocentric nuclear family. Crucially, these relationalities are political: They organize governance, structure communal responsibility, and ground sovereignty. Indigenous political life is lived through relations, through practices of tending to land, upholding obligations to human and more-than-human kin, and sustaining the conditions for collective flourishing.
Queer theory and praxis similarly challenge possessive, heteronormative, and hierarchical models of belonging, instead emphasizing fluid, non-exclusive, and care-based forms of relation. Queer and Indigenous futures meet in their insistence that being is always being-with: a practice of responsibility, consent, and reciprocity that exceeds ownership and resists enclosure. When brought into conversation with Indigenous governance, queer futures can expand beyond human-centered frameworks to include relations with land, waters, plants, and animals as active participants in social and political life. Indigenous relationality thus brings the more-than-human world to bear on queer imaginaries, unsettling not only norms of gender and sexuality but also assumptions about what and who constitutes community, kinship, and futurity.
The future of political theology, as I imagine it, lies in the continued recognition and protection of these relational ontologies as sovereign frameworks that unsettle settler-colonial governance, including its impositions on gender, sexuality, and kinship.
Anca Wilkening is an incoming Barra Postdoctoral Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
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The state of the world being what it is, it is hard to predict much of anything. But what we can say for certain is that Native Americans and other Indigenous peoples will continue to express and enact their self-determination. They will do so in a set of nested relationships with one another and with nature.
To understand and facilitate such efforts, my strong sense is that scholars of religion working in this area should continue to pursue and expand community-engaged research initiatives. It is not enough to theorize other peoples’ sacred intimacies from a distance. Yet grappling with what it means to work with and learn from communities directly is not an obvious or one-size-fits-all pathway forward. In my view, we will each need to bump along on uneven ground, trying collectively to navigate our way to something new and different – something that matters to the communities we are privileged to work with while remaining discernably and productively oriented to classic religious studies questions concerned with meaning-making, relationship-building, and story-telling, alongside critical issues regarding political life, legal status, and the protection of world-defining lands and waters.
Greg Johnson is Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
