Knowing with Indigenous Land: Rekindling the Embers of Tibet's Ancestral Knowing in Education

This dissertation focuses on how Tibetan cosmologies and place-based traditions, relationships, and practices inform and require a distinct approach to education and research in and for Tibet. It centrally explores Land as embodying processes of education and as a distinct theoretical and philosophical concern which expresses deeply grounded Tibetan philosophies, principles, terms of knowledge, and education. The research uses Indigenous methodologies and multiple methods of qualitative inquiry to study Tibetan language texts of diverse genres and documented oral traditions to articulate how the Tibetan Land relates to, and is related to by, the Tibetan people as the educational foundation, the intellectual vessel, the spirit, and the purpose of the Tibetan world, thereby constituting the lifeworld of Tibetan Land education. Indigenous theorizations of knowledge. education, pedagogies, and methodologies in relationship to Indigenous Lands deeply inform and orient the inspiration and purpose of the research. It is hoped that the project contributes to the growing field of transnational Indigenous studies, particularly on Indigenous ways of knowing and becoming in relation to Land and places.