Dr. George E. “Tink” Tinker is Auburn’s 2019 Walter Wink Scholar-Activist Award Winner
Dr. George E. “Tink” Tinker, a citizen of the Osage (wazhazhe) Nation, continues his career-spanning efforts both fighting for American Indian justice and challenging eurochristian students and communities to recognize their own history of violence on the continent. His classroom teaching and his publishing was always based on the ideal of activist scholarship. His research and publishing were never satisfied with merely advancing knowledge. Rather, he always tried to rock the boat of the status quo in order to point toward substantive change for justice.
For this work and so much more, Dr. Tinker is the 2019 Walter Wink Scholar-Activist Award Winner.
The award is named for beloved Auburn faculty member Walter Wink. Dr. Wink was known for his award-winning and beloved biblical studies on “The Powers,” studies integral to his passionate work for peace and nonviolence, LGBTQ inclusion, equality, and human rights.
At Auburn, we are proud to build on Wink’s beautiful, radical legacy. Our reception at The American Academy of Religion (AAR) and Society of Biblical Literature’s (SBL) joint annual meetings welcomes scholar-activists, working on many justice fronts, to promote cross-pollinations between ideas and contacts. We are honored to support your scholarship, activism, and full self.
Please join Auburn’s President, the Rev. Dr. Katharine Rhodes Henderson on Monday evening, November 25th, 7:30-9:00 at our reception to celebrate Dr. Tinker and our scholar-activist community.
This year, we are delighted to give the fifth annual award to one of the leading scholars of Native American religion, and a life-long committed activist for the liberation of Native peoples.
Dr. Tinker was not only an advocate for justice, but persistently participated in planning and implementing protest actions, particularly with the American Indian Movement of Colorado. As a justice activist, he also inspired students to join in justice protest movements on the street. His activist role as a force for social change became a large part of his classroom identity. “My job as a professor was always to stir the mud up from the bottom of the pond, to encourage students to sort out the world in a different way.” Tinker, however, always credited his students both for pressing his intellectual development and his commitment to social justice activism. “My students were inordinately receptive, and they helped me by pushing me even further in my thinking and activism.”
Dr. Tinker is the Clifford Baldridge Emeritus Professor of American Indian Cultures and Religious Traditions at Iliff School of Theology.
Professor Tinker’s work has served to unsettle our generation’s unthinking embrace of the colonial settlers and the ‘romance and self-serving colonialist histories.’ He points us all to the uncomfortable reality that if we are to own anything, as opposed to land, it is the realization that this rationalization led to systemic violence and the genocide of Indian people.”
Rev. Dr. Thomas V. Wolfe, President of Iliff School of Theology
We are delighted to offer copies of Dr. Tinker’s American Indian Liberation: A Theology of Sovereignty (2008) to the first 50 people to arrive at Auburn Seminary’s AAR/SBL reception through a partnership with Orbis Press.
Your leadership is imperative in times such as these, and as we honor Dr. Tinker, we as well honor our many friends who are living lives of Scholar-Activism.
Learn more about Scholar Activism at Auburn: auburnseminary.org/scholar-activism/
Thank you for being a member of this community.
