Recent scholarship has witnessed a shift away from the image of Buddhism as historically reactive and reformist or as locally imported and foreign, in other words as a missionarizing religion which always arrives late and produces historical narratives of conquest, civilization, and acculturation. This course will confront these older dominant narratives with emergent visions of Buddhism as originary, autochthonous, oppressed, and subversive that have shaped much of politically active, ritually creative, and textually productive Buddhist life between the 19th and the 21st century, in Asia and beyond. The course will look at the connections between early Orientalist theories of the Buddha's tribal origins and the revolutionary historiographies of Dalit theorists like Jyotirao Phule, B. K. Ambedkar, and Iyothee Dass which turn on their head claims to the Brahmanical beginnings and supremacy of religion in South Asia and theorize Buddhism as India's original religion ("We have always been Buddhists.") that holds the promise to liberate the oppressed. In a second move, the Dalit Buddhist indigenous will be confronted with a rich array of ethnically oriented cultures of resistance across Central, South, and Southeast Asia, such as the Gurung, the Newars, the Baruas, and the Tibetans, for which their religious identity is associated with place, genealogy, gender, and belonging and is articulated in forms of resistance to state power associated with the repression and/or appropriation of Buddhism. Students will be encouraged to juxtapose those passages in premodern Buddhist literature that have been hermeneutically mobilized to support such struggles with other Buddhist scriptural passages that have dehumanized the indigenous and have advocated for their oppression. Thirdly, students will explore the interest in Buddhism, mediated by Anglophone New Age ecology and spirituality, among authors and activists from the indigenous communities of the Americas, through the engagement with work by scholars such as Chicana Apache Natalie Avalos and Canadian Cree poet and UTSC faculty Randy Lundy. The teaching plan includes reaching out to one or more community representatives for in-class discussions. The course will aim at formulating an answer to the question what Buddhism may have contributed and what Buddhist Studies may contribute towards decolonization and indigenous empowerment.