I was born and raised in a Tibetan nomadic community in the Amdo province of Tibet. My parents have never been to school, but they know a lot about their ancestral land, animals, and life in general. As an Indigenous anthropologist, my research, teaching, and collaborative community work integrate the interdependent relationships between land, language, and community, with concerns about Chinese state environmental policy and displacement, and a comparative approach to the use of Indigenous creatives arts as responses to these issues.
Drawing on Tibetan genres of Indigenous storywork, such as origin stories, sacred place narratives, traditional songs and folktales, epic stories, ritual texts, as well as two years of ethnographic fieldwork in eastern Tibet (2017-2019), my current research analytically centers Tibetan pastoralists’ ways of theorizing and relating to their land jeopardized by large-scale rangeland fencing and resettlement policies. Several academic publications have emerged out of this project. These include a co-edited volume in Nomadic Peoples on mass relocation of Tibetan nomads, a peer-reviewed article in Critical Asian Studies, as well as a number of widely-read online academic essays advocating for the interdependent relationship between land, language, and the wellbeing of people and community in Tibetan and English.
To make my scholarship accessible to a broader audience, particularly to the communities with whom I work closely, I co-authored a well-received Tibetan children’s book in collaboration with Tibetan artists and environmentalists that tells an Indigenous history of land and beings based on storywork and in-depth interviews. Since 2015, I have also been working closely with a network of native/indigenous community artists whose work strives to construct an alternative narrative of Tibetan pastoralists’ relationality with the land through documentary films, paintings, as well as land-based educational events.
At the University of Michigan, I have initiated a Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshop on the topic of Rethinking Decolonization, which re-examines current prevalent paradigms related to "decolonization," particularly through examining the works of members of colonized or formerly colonized societies, especially Black, Indigenous, and other Global South writers and thinkers. This workshop attracted a great deal of interest, including the membership of several dozen graduate students from multiple disciplines across the university, including anthropology, history, the combined anthro-history program, comparative literature, and Asian languages and cultures.
ACADEMIC HONORS, AWARDS, AND FELLOWSHIPS
- University of Michigan Rackham Predoctoral Fellow ($33,000)
- University of Michigan Graham Sustainability Institute Fellow ( $15,000)
- Rackham Humanities Research Fellow ($20,000)
- Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Fellowship ($ 20,000)
- Rackham International Research Award ($8,000)
- Commendation for Excellence for Academic Performance, Reed College
COURSES TAUGHT AND DESIGNED
- Conservation, Indigeneity, and Displacement (Spring 2021)
- Studying Tibetan Language through Music and Poetry (Fall 2020)
- Introduction to Anthropology (Fall 2015, Winter 2015, Fall 2016, Winter 2016)
- Communism and Capitalism in Eastern Europe (Winter 2017)
COURSE DEVELOPMENT INTERESTS
- Indigenous Struggles for Land, Language, and Life in Asia
- Land, Language, and Environment in the Himalayas
- Centering Community: Revitalizing Languages by Restoring Land-based Relationships
- Comparative Indigenous Political Movements in North America and Asia
LANGUAGE SKILLS
- Tibetan: Excellent writing and reading skills (native speaker)
- Classical literary Tibetan: Reading fluency
- Mandarin Chinese: Excellent writing, reading, and speaking skills (native fluency)
- Classical Chinese: Excellent writing and reading skills
- English: Excellent writing, reading, and speaking skills (native fluency)
- Sanskrit: Excellent reading skills
