I did not approach decoloniality in search of a theory. Instead, the everyday experiences of Abya Yala and its colonial history raised questions I could not ignore.
I begin my decolonial journey from this self-understanding: as a descendant of Native peoples and as a Christian theologian, how do I think and feel about God? For many years, I have wrestled with what it means to affirm both dimensions of my identity and to validate my own existence without having to choose between them. I begin with my family, with where I come from, and from there I think about God. I then look around me—to my community, to the land, and to the histories that have shaped us—and ask how I can, as abya Yala theologian, become attentive to these experiences and develop a theology from Abya Yala that integrates ancestral knowledge without diminishing it, but instead approaches it with humility.
This is where I begin to think otherwise.
I first encountered decoloniality not as a theory but as a question: What changes when people whose knowledge has been ignored become the central ones who participate in making knowledge?
This question has deeply shaped my theological work. I have come to understand that theological knowledge does not emerge only from seminaries, books, or universities. It is also rooted in memory, land, spirituality, community, struggle, and everyday life. My work in both psychology and theology has made this especially clear to me. The language we use to describe religious identity, spirituality, and theology is never neutral; it reflects particular histories, assumptions, and power structures about whose knowledge matters, whose voices are heard, and whose ways of knowing are considered legitimate.
First, I have shifted from seeing Native people and their spiritual practices simply as objects of analysis. Native people and communities should also be recognized as creators of theological knowledge.
Second, I have moved from thinking of knowledge as universal to understanding it as rooted in specific places, histories, and times. What is often called “universal knowledge” frequently emerges from a Eurocentric perspective, a particular history and culture that has claimed the authority to speak for everyone. Decolonial thinking in Abya Yala asks us to return to our historical roots and recognize that our ancestral knowledge and ways of knowing have value in themselves.
Third, I have shifted from focusing primarily on written texts to valuing embodied knowledge. I have begun to question why written theology is so often considered more authoritative than knowledge emerging from lived experience and community. Oral histories, ancestral memories, women’s stories, rituals, relationships with the land, everyday spirituality, and Indigenous ways of knowing are also important sources for theology.
These changes have affected both the questions I ask and the way I write. I now pay greater attention to where knowledge comes from, whose voices are missing, and how power operates through academic language and institutions.
In recent years, when I explain and introduce Abya Yala theology, I encounter questions that can be deeply confrontational: “Is this Christianity?” “Is this syncretism?” “Is this theology?” Sometimes these questions reveal the limits of the categories being used to evaluate our work.
This requires us to unlearn and learn. Decolonial theology is not something we accomplish once and then move beyond. It is a constant process of questioning the frameworks we have inherited and demonstrating that other ways of doing theology are possible.
A significant change for me happened when I stopped asking how Native spiritualities could fit into Christian categories and started thinking about God without limiting God to a single culture or theological framework.
This shift has been especially important in my work with Women doing theology in Abya Yala. Their work challenges the assumption that Christianity must always be defined through categories inherited from particular historical and cultural contexts. For those of us who identify ourselves through our Native ancestry and histories, this process can create a new freedom to think about God more broadly and to refuse the idea that there is only one legitimate way to understand faith, spirituality, or theology.
The world is not just one story or one way of knowing. There are many ways to live, interpret, remember, and do theology.
Sometimes this work means explaining why the knowledge of marginalized communities should be heard. At other times, the challenge takes place within academic spaces, where we must insist that knowledge also emerges from the peripheries. Communities that have historically been treated as objects of study are also places where knowledge is created, preserved, and transmitted.
Because of this, I am careful about how often the word “decolonial” is used. It can become just another academic label: decolonial curriculum, decolonial theology, decolonial pedagogy, and so on. But changing our vocabulary does not necessarily change our systems. Decolonization is not simply about adding new authors to the same tradition. If the reading list changes but the structures of power remain the same, then little has fundamentally changed.
So, the real test of decolonial thinking is whether it is thinking from and with. Decolonial theology in abya yala must work together with Native peoples who have resisted the colonization of their bodies, lands, cultures, and knowledge and continue their spiritual practices alive. It must also engage the experiences of Afro-descendant peoples whose histories of enslavement, resistance, and liberation have generated their own forms of knowledge and theological reflection.
For me, it is always helpful to ask a few fundamental questions: Who is included? Who is heard? Whose knowledge is valued? Who decides? And what kinds of knowledge do our institutions accept as legitimate?
For me, thinking otherwise is more than simply thinking differently. It means making space for theologians like me who find it necessary to begin by naming our ancestral histories and locations before presenting our theology. From that starting point, it becomes possible to understand why the theology we propose can be genuinely decolonial.
Perhaps decolonial theology always begins with a question: Where does this theologian begin, and who is this theologian learning from?
Only by asking these questions can we begin to understand what it means to think otherwise.
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