Tashi Dekyid Monet

Tashi Dekyid Monet (མོ་ངེ་བཀྲ་ཤིས་བདེ་སྐྱིད།) is a Tibetan scholar, writer, and translator whose academic and literary work explores Indigenous Land-based traditions, multispecies justice, and the intersections of literature, spirituality, peoplehood, and the environment.

Born and raised in Minyak Rabgang, one of the Six Mountain Ranges of eastern Tibet, she earned her BA in Tibetan Literature from Minzu University of China. Her undergraduate thesis focused on environmental ethics and grief in Tibetan fiction, including the works of Tsering Dhondrub. She received her Ph.D. in Education from the University of Virginia (2024), where her research connects Tibetan literary and oral traditions of Land, Buddhist sacred geography, Indigenous storytelling, popular culture—art, music, literature and film—with global conversations on decolonial methodologies, critical Indigenous education, traditional ecological knowledge, human geography, environmental humanities, and multispecies justice.

Her academic writing includes “Translating the Tibetan Lifeworld: An Ontological Bridge or Erasure” (Yeshe), the forthcoming trilingual anthology Hope that Burns, Friendship that Heals: An Anthology by Tibetan Women Writers, and “Rejoicing in Reciprocity” (The Brooklyn Rail), She has authored three Tibetan-language children’s books—Ten Precious Yaks, Snow Friend, and Where Are You?—and translated works by Joy Harjo, Leslie Marmon Silko, Margaret Atwood, and others into Tibetan.

She co-organized the 2022 international Symposium of Tibetan Women Writers and organized numerous events supporting emerging Tibetan scholars in Western academia. In the 2025-26 year, she will co-lead the project “Indigenous Knowledge and Climate Change on the Tibetan Plateau and the Himalayas” in the Modern Tibetan Studies program at Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. Columbia students can now register for her fall course, "Climate Change: The Tibetan Plateau as a Case Study."

Her current projects include turning her PhD thesis into a book project, developing an Indigenous Land education model for Tibetan youth, and designing contemplative practices grounded in Tibetan Buddhist elemental philosophy and Indigenous Land education. She also aspires to explore and collaborate on comparative studies of high mountain Indigenous communities from the Tibetan Plateau and the Altai to the Andes to understand their lifeways, strategies, and aspirations for environmental ethics, cultural survivance, and multispecies justice.