This course is designed to prepare students to design and carry out an independent ethnographic research project. Students will complete several in-class and field exercises related to a collaborative ethnographic project, culminating in a final ethnographic report and oral presentation of findings. Weekly reading and listening assignments will complement fieldwork and form the basis for in-class discussions about ongoing research. Course activities center around the experience of collecting, analyzing, and presenting behavioral data using a variety of ethnographic techniques such as participant-observation, interviews, and more experimental methods
ART_HIST 390-0-3 / HUM 370-6-10 Who is an Object?: Ancestors, Gods and Intermediaries
Formerly called primitive art and also known as the, Non-Western art is a geographically-expansive category connected by the histories of colonialism and imperialism that brought the art and artifacts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas into Western museums. In fact, many of the objects that comprise this canon are oftentimes not “objects” at all. Taking a decolonial approach to study the canon of Non-Western art, this course addresses the animacies and ontologies of different categories of “objects” in museum collections, including materially-embodied deities such as Katsina dolls (Hopi) and Orishas (Yoruba diaspora); ancestors that take form as seeds (Pueblo) and ceramics (Mimbres), and materials such as feathers (Aztec, Tupinamba, Hawaiian) and pipestone (Lakota, Dakota and Yankton Sioux) that mediate different realms of existence. The class will also consider the remains of humans, plants, and animals housed in anthropology and natural history museums. The question of objecthood also applies to people conceptualized as property, sold as commodities and displayed within ethnographic and World’s Fair contexts as well as the land upon which museums are built. We will learn about some of the ways that these “objects” entered into museums as we compare the Western epistemologies by which they are organized there to the indigenous ontologies they occupy within their cultures of origin.
ENVR_POL 390-0-26 Special Topics in Environmental Policy and Culture: Environmental Justice in Black & Indigenous W.Lit
While ecocriticism has not always considered the lived experience of women of color, literary texts by African American and Native American women have found ways of theorizing their own versions of environmental and spatial justice. Reading leading theorists like Rob Nixon and Edward Soja side by side with Jesmyn Ward's post-Katrina novel Salvage the Bones (2011), Toni Jensen's stories about oil and fracking on Indigenous lands, and poetry by Nikky Finney and Heid E. Erdrich, this class interrogates how literature can inform our understanding of environmental injustice and different types of violence. It grounds the discussion in a longer history of colonial extraction and Indigenous dispossession, racism, structural neglect, and ongoing residential segregation by discussing Zora Neale Hurston's 1937 hurricane novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and looking at Zitkala-?a's influential 1924 report on the settler defrauding of Osage Indians for their oil-rich lands.
HIST 102-6-22 First Year Seminar: Native Americans in Film
In 1893, Thomas Edison unveiled the kinetoscope and allowed audience members to glimpse the Hopi Snake Dance by peeking into the device's viewing window. Since the birth of the motion picture, films portraying Native Americans (often with non-Native actors in redface) have drawn upon earlier frontier mythology, art, literature, and Wild West performances. These depictions in film have embedded romanticized and stereotyped ideas about American Indians in the imaginations of audiences throughout the United States and around the world. In this course, we will critically examine representations of Native Americans in film, ranging from the origins of the motion picture industry to the works of contemporary Indigenous filmmakers. We will reflect upon revisionist narratives, the use of film as a form of activism, Indigenous aesthetics and storytelling techniques, reflexivity, and parody. Throughout the quarter, we will discuss ethnographic, documentary, and narrative films.
This course examines the historical, political, economic, and social forces that have shaped the health of Indigenous peoples living within the borders of settler colonial states. This class interprets health and healing broadly and, as such, we will be considering histories of colonialism and state violence, struggles for sovereignty and self-governance, environmental justice, food and nutrition, biomedical research, and biopolitics in both reservation and urban settings. We will ask questions like: How have doctors and scientists and explained the health disparities that Indigenous peoples experience? How has medicine produced definitions of indigeneity? How have Indigenous healing practices persisted and transformed? Can medicine be decolonized and what role might it play in Indigenous sovereignty? In our effort to explore complex historiographical and methodological issues, we will be reading literature from a range of fields—including the history of science and medicine, Indigenous studies, anthropology, science and technology studies, Native American history, and environmental history—and discussing how scholars across disciplines have grappled with the complex relationships that exist between indigeneity, health, and settler colonialism. Finally, we will turn our analytical lens back on ourselves and consider the ethics and politics of various forms of historical inquiry.
JOUR 367-0-20 Native American Environmental Issues and the Media
Native American Environmental Issues and the Media introduces students to indigenous issues, such as treaty-based hunting, fishing, and gathering rights; air and water quality issues; mining; land-to-trust issues; and sacred sites. These issues have contributed to tension between Native and non-Native communities and have become the subject of news reports, in both mainstream and tribal media. We will focus on how the media cover these issues and how that coverage contributes to the formation of public opinion and public policy. Students will read and analyze newspaper and on-line news reports and view and critique broadcast news stories and documentaries about Native environmental topics.
SPANISH 340-0-1 Colonial Latin American Literature
Major texts and writers of the early colonial period, including chronicles of discovery and conquest from both indigenous and Hispanic sources. Works by authors such as Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, Hernan Cortes, Bernal Diaz del Castillo, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Bartolome de las Casas, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, and Carlos de Siguenza y Gongora.
