04:30 PM to 07:10 PM M
Innovation Hall 330
Section Information for Fall 2022
An introduction to the histories, social organizations, political experiences, and artistic expressions of American Indians. As much as possible, we'll develop an Indigenous-centered understanding of both Native history and Indian-white relations. My current plan is to organize this course into five sections:
1. #NODAPL. We'll talk about the Water Protector Movement that formed about six years ago to resist the Dakota Access Pipeline. Our work on #NODAPL will include discussions of Indigenous sovereignty, land claim, and environmental thinking as well as Indigenous perspectives on climate change, the Anthropocene, apocalypse, and environmental justice.
2. MEMORYSCAPES. Memoryscapes are places where the land itself helps people remember what happened there. Some memoryscapes take the form of stories about a place; in others, the land contains physical marks or markers that tell stories about a place's history. We'll talk about Indigenous memoryscapes and use this concept to help us think about a selection of key locations and events in Indigenous US history.
3. REMOVAL. In this part of the class we'll look closely at the politics and traumas of the Indian Removal Crisis. We'll go back to the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s to find out more about what exactly happened and why. We'll also consider "removal" as a broader colonial strategy, linked to erasure and other forms of Indigenous "vanishing."
4. BOARDING/RESIDENTIAL SCHOOLS. We'll talk about the recent discoveries of unmarked student graves at Canadian residential schools for Indigenous people. Then we'll look into the broader histories of colonial education systems such as boarding schools (US) and residential schools (Canada). We'll also discuss Indigenous decolonizing methodologies: Indigenous perspectives on teaching, pedagogy, and research. Broader topics here include memory, trauma, social justice, reconciliation, and, again, sovereignty and agency.
5. INDIGENOUS ART AND POPULAR CULTURE. To wrap up the semester, we'll take a look at some of the things that are happening right now in Indigenous art, film, television, and other media.
NAIS 201 is the one required course for the interdisciplinary minor in Native American and Indigenous Studies.
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Credits: 3
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