Papers by Abel R Gomez
American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 2024
Land and land access is returning to Indigenous peoples across the world. This article theorizes ... more Land and land access is returning to Indigenous peoples across the world. This article theorizes ways that two California tribal organizations, Sogorea Te’ Land Trust and Amah Mutsun Land Trust, are revitalizing cultural practices through renewed access to land. Defying narratives of “extinction” as nonrecognized California tribes, the work of these organizations is not simply about cultural or political resurgence, however, but also about the creative restoration of sacred practices that situate the communities in a robust web of relations, both seen and unseen. Building on Cutcha Risling Baldy’s theory of “(re)riteing,” this article examines how ceremony is a central part of land-based resurgence for these organizations. The author shows that returning to land after multiple waves of colonization and dispossession means “(re)riteing” the land through ceremonies, songs, and prayers. These practices root tribal members in ancestral ways of relating to their territory. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper argues that this “(re)riteing” is a vital example of what Laura Harjo describes as “Indigenous futurity praxis.” Taken together, Sogorea Te’ Land Trust and Amah Mutsun Land Trust suggest that Indigenous land-based resurgence is both political and cultural, epistemological and cosmological, part of global movements toward dynamic Indigenous futures.
Bulletin for the Study of Religion, 2018
In We Are Dancing For You, Risling Baldy explores the meaning and process of the revival of the C... more In We Are Dancing For You, Risling Baldy explores the meaning and process of the revival of the Ch'ilwa:l, the Flower Dance, a coming-of-age ceremony for women of her tribe. The text opens with an epigraph from Lois Risling, a Hupa medicine woman and the author's mother, "The Flower Dance is a dance that I wish all young women could have. . . .[This dance] does heal. That kind of intensive trauma where women have been abused and mutilated both spiritually and emotionally and physically." (ix). These words offer a sense of what is at stake in this text. As Risling Baldy explains, Native women in what is now known as California were targets of strategic attacks of genocide by settler colonial governments through rape, murder, missionization, boarding schools, and assimilation. Such attacks worked to erase Native women's leadership, power, and ceremonial traditions. We can see the legacy of similar acts of violence in the ongoing epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and two spirits across North America. This work is personal, too, as Risling Baldy is a member of the Hoopa Valley Tribe in northern California.1 She reflects on her own relationship as scholar and participant of the revitalization of this dance. Risling Baldy's text is particularly interesting in the nuanced ways she links the revival of this ceremony to Hupa cosmology, feminist theory, critiques of menstrual "taboos," embodiment, and decolonial futurity.
Political Theology, 2023
The California mission system linked Spanish Catholic and political institutions. To secure land ... more The California mission system linked Spanish Catholic and political institutions. To secure land and convert Indigenous peoples, the Spanish built 21 missions from San Diego to Sonoma in the 18th and 19th centuries. These missions were sites of disease, violence, and mass death. They were also places built by Native people, on Native lands, where they lived, prayed, and were buried. As a result, missions are fundamentally Indigenous places and important touchstones for descendants today. This article examines such meanings in the lives of several Ohlone peoples, Indigenous peoples of the San Francisco-Monterey region. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with Ohlone tribes, I argue that we can understand relationships they sustain with California missions by considering such places as Indigenous cemeteries, Indigenous churches, and especially both. While dominant narratives restrict “missionized” Indigenous peoples to an irrecoverable past, this paper theorizes California mission as sites of violence, survival, and belonging to homeland.
Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture,, 2024
What does engaged scholarship on religion look like in the context of ongoing occupation of Indig... more What does engaged scholarship on religion look like in the context of ongoing occupation of Indigenous lands? This article enters this conversation by examining research as fundamentally relational. Drawing on Shawn Wilson's model of 'research as ceremony', the author argues that a move toward engaged scholarship is a move toward understanding the ways in which Scholar and the community the scholar works with are embedded in relationship as well as the importance of ongoing selfreflection on one's place in community. Engaged scholarship, therefore, is rooted in awareness of relationships, contributions to relationships, and, ultimately, is invested in strengthening relationships. The author turns to his ethnographic experiences with Ohlone tribes in the San Francisco and Monterey areas to examine ways this could look on the ground with particular communities. The article concludes by exploring the position of scholar as respectful 'guest' and the possibility of more intimate connections as a 'relative'.
Book Reviews by Abel R Gomez
Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2025
In Native Alienation, Charles Sepulveda theorizes the violence of the mission system as processes... more In Native Alienation, Charles Sepulveda theorizes the violence of the mission system as processes which fundamentally worked to alienate California Indians from complex relationships to land, kinship, history, identity, culture, and traditional spirituality – all those elements that make them Indigenous. He argues for the importance of considering this process through the lens of physical and metaphysical conquest: “Conquest in California … functioned through the simultaneous genocide and enslavement of California Indians whose land and bodies were possessed by a white supremacist regime intent on possessing their souls as well” (15).
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Papers by Abel R Gomez
Book Reviews by Abel R Gomez