This course examines the challenges that contemporary Native American tribes and nations face as they endeavor to rebuild their communities, strengthen their cultures, and support their citizens. The range of issues that Native leaders and policymakers confront is wide and encompass political sovereignty, economic development, constitutional reform, cultural promotion, land and water rights, religious freedom, health and social welfare, and education. Because the challenges are broad and comprehensive, the course emphasizes the...
Dan Carpenter Mondays/Wednesdays, 12:00 PM - 1:15 PM ET
Examines the challenges and strategies of advocacy, sovereignty building and institutional development among Native Nations in the U.S. Includes engaged scholarship working with Native Nations on these issues.
Phil Deloria Sophomore Tutorial, History Department Wednesdays, 12:00 PM - 12:45 PM ET
What is it to be Indigenous? Is indigeneity a contemporary political formation, the product of centuries of colonial and imperial incursions into the lands of others? Is it an aboriginal, autochthonous presence that has existed from ancient time, with a continuity based on both survival and self-possession? Or something else entirely? While many first peoples prefer culturally specific identities over the general term indigenous, others embrace Indigeneity...
Tiya Miles Teaching Fellow: Sarah Sadlier Tuesday/Thursday, 1:30 PM - 2:45 PM ET
This combined lecture/discussion course explores histories of women from diverse Indigenous nations within the current boundaries of the United States. The course traces multiple themes that intersect Native women’s lives: concepts of family and intimate relationships; spiritual understandings and notions of tradition; gender roles and cross-cultural gender difference; processes and kinds of colonialism, conceptions of land and effects of land dispossession; cultural negotiation, change, and...
(Open to 1L HLS students only) Professor Joseph William Singer Tentative Meeting Dates: Meeting time: 5:00 to 7:00 pm Dates: Tue Sept 15, Tue Sept 29, Wed Oct 14, Tue Oct 27
There are currently 574 federally-recognized Indian nations within the territorial boundaries of the United States. The U.S. has...
In 1920, Carter G. Woodson (the “father of Black history”) argued the following in the Journal of Negro History: “One of the longest unwritten chapters of the history of the United States is that treating of the relations of the Negroes and the Indians.” Historians have endeavored to write that...
What happened in the past? How do you know? Even though today we take great pains to document every major event that occurs, more than 99% of human history is not written down. How, then, can we determine with any certainty what people did, let alone thought about, hundreds, thousands, and even millions of...
What happened in America before 1492? What were the major turning points in Native American history? Why don't we know more about the ancient history of North America? Anthropology 1080 answers these questions by introducing you to the discipline of North American archaeology. This course...
This course will engage three major themes. First, it will review issues related to the complex relationships between anthropology and colonialism(s) and their after lives in the postcolonial settings in which anthropologists work. While it is not a course focused narrowly on anthropology and...
Philip J Deloria Monday/Wednesday, 10:30 AM – 11:45 AM
In the 2010 U.S. Census, 5.2 million people identified themselves as being of American Indian or Alaska Native descent. Of these, 2.9 million identified themselves as American Indian or Alaska Native alone, about 1.7 percent of the nation’s population. These demographics...
Whales, wolves, great apes, big cats, buffalo, bears-- these animals populate human cultural imaginations. From animal advocacy groups to zoos to movies, so-called "charismatic megafauna" and/or “flagship species” dominate a wide swath of debates. By focusing on a selection of animals, this course explores a) how people interpret these animals, and b) how human interactions impact these animals and their natural environments. Organized around different animals and the controversies, questions, and events...
Throughout history, social justice movements and social justice organizations have utilized disciplined inquiry or research to highlight untold stories, illuminate goodness, expose power and colonialism, and offer pathways to more equity and freedom. Yet, we often do not provide educators or doctoral students with research methodology training oriented to these aims. More specifically, we often do not provide educators in the field or doctoral students with research methodology training beyond those...
The purpose of this course is to question prevailing, relatively uniform and quite limiting forms of education in light of approaches that escape or overcome these forms. A mode of education is more than mere content and pedagogy. It refers to ways of knowing, forms of life, conceptions of power, value systems, and structuring goals that ultimately underlie a people’s understanding of what education is and does. Therefore, this course concerns more than a simple familiarity with alternative models of learning—rather,...
This field-based research course focuses on some of the major issues that Native American Indian tribes and nations face as the 21st century begins. It provides in-depth, hands-on exposure to native development issues, including: sovereignty, economic development, constitutional reform, leadership, health and social welfare, land and water rights, culture and language, religious freedom, and education. In particular, the course emphasizes problem definition, client relationships, and designing and completing a research project. The course...
Ju Yon Kim Tuesday and Thursdays, 1:30 PM - 02:45 PM
From depictions of exchanges in the early colonial Americas to efforts to envision alternate and imminent futures, this class will examine representations of interracial encounters in U.S. American culture. We will explore how various texts and performances have conceived, embodied, and reimagined the relationships not only among differently racialized groups, but also between race and nation, individual and community, and art and politics. Topics addressed in this course will include narratives of indigeneity,...
Zachary Nowak Tuesdays and Thursdays, 9:00am-10:15am
What’s the problem with wilderness? Or the environmental movement? Or invasive species? This course examines how humans thought about and used the natural world over the centuries—and the consequences of both use of and thoughts about the nature. Students will learn about food, climate change, pollution, conquest and resistance, environmentalism, and energy. This course actively seeks to show the importance of the material world and the contributions of a broad spectrum of historical actors to US...
Water is life, but is it a human right? Water governance is a contentious issue globally because humans rely on water for nearly every productive activity; moreover, it is often scarce and not distributed equally. To better understand the persistence and escalation of struggles over water access around the world, this course uses a multidisciplinary approach that allows students to examine both the social and physical shape of water in a modern and historical context. While all bodies of water deserve mention,...
This hands-on course will introduce key episodes and issues in the history of American astronomy by close looking at rare early scientific instruments and tangible objects in Harvard collections. Starting with the story of Captain John Smith, Pocahontas, and a sundial, the course will move from colonial relations with Native Americans to the controversial placement of observatories on sacred mountaintops today. In between, we will discuss the roles of religion, politics, science, and culture in the...
Initiated by a Muskogee student, this course will be advised by Prof. Ann Braude (Harvard Divinity) and Marcus Briggs-Cloud, HDS 2010. Any student interested in indigenous history and culture of the Southeastern US is welcome. Meeting time to be arranged. Permission of the Instructor required. For further information contact ann_braude@harvard.edu.
Eleanor Craig Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10:30am-11:45am
How might critical attention to race and ethnicity as they intersect with gender and sexuality—and also frameworks of indigeneity and class—shape how we study? How do these lenses shift the questions we ask, the information that counts as data, and the genres of work that we recognize as 'academic'?For those newer to studies of race and ethnicity, this course provides intersectional frameworks for recognizing what assumptions undergird academic projects and fields of study. For...
This course explores ways in which human collectives have conceived of other animals, whether in analogical relations for scientific research, exploitative relations for food and labor, affective relations like fear, disgust, love. What are some histories of these unique interdependencies between human animals and nonhuman animals? We will critically explore the relentless and yet slippery divisions between humans and nonhuman animals, seeing them as a falsely singular, conflictual and segregatory divide that has played...
This course introduces the archaeological study of the ancient societies of eastern North America, with a focus on the Ohio River Valley region, the first frontier of the United States. We will explore inter-related aspects of religion, economy, technology, and human biology associated with the span of time ranging from the first arrival of humans to the European invasion of the continent. The emphasis is on key forms and changes in social organization associated with shifts between foraging and farming, the...
