Course Descriptions 2025-26
Spring 2026 Course Descriptions
ENG 374: Studies in Native American and Indigenous Literatures: Writing from Memory
Memory is an enduring and powerful source of inspiration for Indigenous storytelling. However, it can also be deeply controversial and contentious. In his creative non-fiction essay titled “Beauty & Memory & Abuse & Love”, Navajo author Bojan Louis offers a cutting take on memory by an anonymous Blackfeet writer: “You never ask a Native to talk about their childhood. That’s Indigenous 101. You think life on the reservation is pretty? Fuck that. Natives never talk about their childhood”. From a similar place of tension and discomfort, Kanaka 'Ōiwi writer Nālani Mattox prefaces her poem “1 page per life” with this memory: “For the mainland English teacher who flunked me in English Literature in the summer of 1978 at UH. She cost me my graduation with the rest of my class in June 1980. Thank God she was only visiting”. Seared in her mind and body, this memory, she writes in the last line of her poem, “haunted” her forever. In both examples, memory is unsettling; yet both Louis and Mattox have transformed these memories to create Indigenous texts and stories. This course asks: Beyond the mind and body, what are other sites of intergenerational memory accessible to Native American and Indigenous writers? How do they navigate a complex phenomenon like memory across these various sites? What types of texts do they produce within their chosen location(s) of memory?
This class will be organized into three sections that explore Indigenous writing from three different sites of memory: 1. Body and mind. 2. Archival texts. 3. Tangible artifacts. Each section will focus on Native American and Indigenous texts that respond to these various sites of memory. These texts include but are not limited to Whereas Layli Long Soldier (2017), Shapes of Native Nonfiction (2019) Eds: Washuta and Warburton, Postcolonial Love Poem Natalie Diaz (2020), No Country for Eight-spot Butterflies (2022) Julian Aguon, Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (2024) Deborah Miranda, Paper Cuts (2024) Jim Terry, and An Ocean of Wonder: The Fantastic in the Pacific (2024) Eds: Bacchilega, ho‘omanawanui, and Warren.
Students will produce critical and analytical reflections of the way selected writers have reconfigured memory to create compelling Indigenous stories. Students will also select one memory site and produce a creative and critical response to their chosen site of memory, referring particularly to selected class texts.
ANTHRO 390: Native/Indigenous Feminist Theory
While the field of study known as Native/Indigenous feminisms is a more recent development, Native women have long articulated trenchant critiques of settler colonialism since its arrival in North America. Consequently, Native/Indigenous feminist theories are key to understanding settler colonial societies like the United States and Canada. By analytically centering Indigenous sovereignty and being attentive to the ways that gender and sexuality are deployed to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their lands and politics, Native/Indigenous feminist theory provides powerful avenues for decolonization. This course will follow the historical development of Native/Indigenous feminist writing and theory as well as read key texts.
ANTHRO 101-8: Native/Indigenous Feminisms: First Year Writing Seminar
Native/Indigenous Feminisms are key to understanding settler colonial societies like the United States and Canada. As a field of study, Native/Indigenous Feminisms analytically centers Indigenous sovereignty to examine how settler colonialism evolved to displace Indigenous peoples politically and within their own lands. This course will examine the historical formation and dynamics of settler colonialism to elucidate how it has shaped the lives of all people living within settler societies.
SPAN 342: Race and Representation in Latin America: Storying Knowledge in the Andes and the Amazon
Storying Knowledge in the Andes and the Amazon Have you ever wondered how indigenous Latin American cultures conceive, compose, and tell their stories? Are you interested in how Andean and Amazonian societies have maintained their local knowledges, histories, and beliefs throughout colonialism and into modernity? We will explore these and similar questions in this class to consider ways in which indigenous and mestizo intellectuals have resisted, refused, and reshaped the the lettered representation of indigenous social reality across the twentieth century and into the present. Focused primarily on works of fiction and testimonial narratives from Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia, this class blends traditional literary approaches with local perspectives and cultural practices. Students will learn foundational components of Andean and Amazonian worldviews to develop new ways of looking at and analyzing literature produced from other sociocultural realities. Material to be covered includes José María Arguedas' Yawar fiesta (1941), Cesar Calvos's Las tres mitades de Iño Moxo, and testimonials like Noqaykuq Kawsayniyku (1996), and Huillca: Habla un campesino peruano (1974), among others. Prerequisite: 1 course from SPANISH 250-0, SPANISH 251-0, SPANISH 260-0, or SPANISH 261-0.
HISTORY 366-0: Latin America in the Independence Era: American Indians and Nations
A thematic survey of independence in Latin America, with emphasis on the experiences of Native Americans. Independence from Spain only intensified debates about race, citizenship, and nation. What role would American civilizations, cultures, languages, and histories play in forging national identities? What has citizenship meant for indigenous people in the region?