George E. "Tink" Tinker is an American Indian scholar of the Osage Nation who taught for more than three decades at the Iliff School of Theology, a United Methodist Church theological school, where he focused his scholarship on the decolonization of American Indian Peoples. The Tinker family name is deeply embedded among the Osage.
Career
Tinker is the Clifford Baldridge Emeritus Professor of American Indian Cultures and Religious Traditions at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado, where he taught from 1985 until 2017. Tinker is a citizen of the wazhazhe udsethe / Osage Nation. For 25 years he served pro bono as the director and spiritual leader of Four Winds American Indian Council. He is also on the leadership council of the American Indian Movement of Colorado and continues to serve on the elders council of the Four Winds American Indian Council. He has also presented in forums across the continent and around the world.
In his best known work, American Indian Liberation, Tinker argues that, "The intellectual and religious realms have been crucial to colonial political and economic domination of indigenous peoples." He believes that Native American Christians need to separate themselves from the colonial thinking of European settlers but draw from Native American spirituality and its emphases on space, nature, and community. He developed this further in the co-authored book Native American Theology.
Tinker's recent work has also examined the historical and institutional controversy and surrounding an atrocity where a book of Christian history that was bound in the skin of an Indigenous Man and gifted to Iliff School of Theology. Although the human skin was removed and given to American Indian Movement representatives in the 1970s, a non-disclosure agreement silenced the institutional role played by the school where the book was displayed for eighty years. With the support of Thomas Wolfe, the current president of the Iliff School, Tinker has worked to build awareness about the book and the lingering ways that institutions benefit from their participation in colonialism.
Works
Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Cultural Genocide (1993) Spirit and Resistance: Political Theology and American Indian Liberation (2004) American Indian Liberation: A Theology of Sovereignty (2008) co-editor of Native Voices: American Indian Identity and Resistance (2003)
ARTICLES:
1. “Weaponized christianity: missiology, jesus, the gospel, and Indigenous Genocide,” Handbook on Intercultural Theology and Missiology, edited by John Flett and Dorottya Nagy (T & T Clark, in press).
2. “How the Eurochristian Invasion of Turtle Island Created the Environmental Crises: Focus on an Early ‘Immigration’,” in Displacement Climes: Shifting Climates, Shifting People, edited by Miguel de la Torre (in press).
3. “The Corons and American Indian Genocide: Weaponizing Infectious Disease as the Continuation of a eurochristian Religious Project,” 2020 Hindsight: The Racial Realization and Religious Significance of the COVID-19 Pandemic, edited by Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas. (in press)
4. “Much Ado about Nothing,” in Faith and Resistance after Trump, edited by Miguel de la Torre (Orbis, 2021), pp. 184–192.
5. “Relationship—Not Ownership: Indigenous Lands and Colonial Occupation,” Tribal Studies (2021).
6. “Occupation in north America: States, Rule of Law, Language, and Indians,” in Resisting Occupation: A Global Struggle for Liberation, ed. by Mitri Raheb and Miguel A. de la Torre (Lexington Books, Fortress Academic, 2022), 175-193.
7. “jesus, the gospel, and Genocide,” in The Colonial Compromise: The Threat of the gospel to the Indigenous Worldview, edited by Miguel de la Torre (Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, December 2020). A volume of essays in honor of Tinker’s career.
8. “Discovery, St. Junípero, Lewis and Clark,” The New Polis (3 November 2020): https://thenewpolis.com/2020/11/03/discovery-st-junipero-lewis-and-clark-tink-tinker-wazhazhe-osage-nation/. This is a slightly revised version of an essay I published in the mennonite journal Intotemak in 2016. Note below. Online publication also makes it more widely available.
9. “Religious Studies: The Final Colonization of American Indians,” Religious Theory, e-supplement to Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory (June 1, 2020): http://jcrt.org/religioustheory/2020/06/01/religious-studies-the-final-colonization-of-american-indians-part-1-tink-tinker-wazhazhe-udsethe/. And: Part 2 (June 9, 2020): http://jcrt.org/religioustheory/2020/06/09/religious-studies-the-final-colonization-of-american-indians-part-1-tink-tinker-wazhazhe-udsethe-2/.