The Land, Indigenous Communities, and Their Church

podcastOPTalksSpiritNationsCritical Theology
Written By Open Plaza

Scholars Rebecca Mendoza and Anthony Trujillo discuss the work of the Terralogian and what it means to decolonize religious practices

Kay WalkingStick, With Love to Marsden, 1995, oil and acrylic paint, wax, glitter on canvas, left panel: 32 1/4 × 32 1/4 in. (81.9 × 81.9 cm) right panel: 32 1/8 × 32 1/8 in. (81.6 × 81.6 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment, 2021.30.2, © Kay Walkingstick, 2017

 
 

In this episode of OPTalks, PhD candidate Rebecca Mendoza interviews PhD candidate Anthony Trujillo about his mixed heritages as a member of Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo and Mexican Catholic traditions on his father’s side, and the white settler Baptist ministers on his mother’s. This conversation was held at the 2023 American Academy of Religion in San Antonio where they talked about identity markers that appear as contradictions or convergences between Indigeneity and Christianity. Mendoza also comes from mixed ancestry, of a Mexican American Catholic father and white settler mother. Trujillo shares how his grandmother insisted that his identities are “so closely tied that you can't be one without the other and in fact that it would almost be a violence to my grandma and her siblings to extricate those things from each other.” The experience of doctoral work has allowed him to delve into “how we think of ourselves.” 

Mendoza and Trujillo discuss the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, the interdisciplinary nature of Indigenous studies, the Native American paradox of simultaneously holding the importance of place with the ability to move and change, and the religious relational work of the “Terralogian” to understand  “spiritual beings and the spiritual body politic” to land or place.

 
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Rebecca Mendoza

Rebecca Mendoza Nunziato is a Xicana, born and raised in Colorado. Mendoza is the daughter and descendant of Mexican migrant farm workers and white settler ranchers. She is a doctoral student in the Committee for the Study of Religion at Harvard University with a focus on Latin American and Caribbean traditions, and a 2023 Ford PreDoctoral Fellow. Mendoza’s scholarship centers Indigenous philosophy, material religion, and ritual survivance pertaining to kinship among humans, plants, animals, ancestors, ancestral belongings, and land. Her interdisciplinary approach bridges ancient Mesoamerican materials and cosmovision with critical theory from Indigenous, Mexican, and Chicanx communities. She was a 2022 Summer Pre-Columbian Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks and a Graduate Student Associate at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. Mendoza is a graduate of Harvard Divinity School (MDiv, 2023) and the University of Oregon (2014) with honors and bachelor degrees in Political Science and Spanish. In addition to her academic research, she has professional experience working in community organizing, advocacy, education, and storytelling.

Featured
Anthony Trujillo

Anthony Trujillo is a member of Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo, one of the six Tewa-speaking pueblos in the upper Rio Grande Valley. As a PhD candidate in American Studies at Harvard University, Trujillo works at the confluence of Native American and Indigenous Studies, history, religious studies, anthropology, and the arts. His research attunes to the bio/geo-graphic manifestations of Indigenous engagement with – and resistance to – colonial/imperial religious, political, and economic systems, largely in the context of 18th and 19th century North America, but also draws connections with contemporary Native nations and descendent communities. From a political and geographic angle, Trujillo seeks to discern the competing sources and configurations of sovereignty. He is also keenly interested in how creative expression—music, visual art, oratory, and literature—become vital avenues through which Indigenous peoples and people of color can move beyond constraints placed on their bodies, form intimate relationships of exchange among diverse communities, and maintain spaces and practices of belonging. Trujillo’s revitalizing practices include music, photography, writing, deserts, forests, bodies of water, the night sky, and cooking. He received an MA in History from Harvard University (2023), an MDiv from Yale University (2019), and a BA in Music Performance from Seattle Pacific University (2002).

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