Professor: Halla Logadottir M-F - 9:00am to 5:00pm
Climate change is transforming the Arctic region. The region is warming at least twice as fast as the global average, and as the ice retreats on the top of our planet, it is unleashing challenges with local, regional, and global implications across multiple policy domains, including environment, economic development, security, culture, and human rights. Impacts are disproportionately affecting indigenous communities that have lived in the Arctic for thousands of years. Through the lens of the rapidly changing Arctic region, this...
Professor: Charlene Galarneau T, TH - 9:30am to 12:00pm
An exploration of the ethics of scientific and social eugenics in 20th/21st century U.S. through historical, bioethical, critical race, Indigenous, gender, and disability frameworks. Attention to roles of medicine, law, and government in relation to eugenic techniques: sterilization, segregation, and marriage restriction as well as genetic technologies, land conservation, and immigration policy. Consideration of resistance to eugenics (moral, scientific, religious, artistic, political) and recent strategies of redress (... Read more about BETH 766: U.S. Eugenics: Legacies and Resurgences
Harvard’s beginnings included a promise to educate both “English and Indian youth.” From its inception, however, Harvard’s endowment included Native lands expropriated through war, theft, and coercion. Drawing inspiration from Harvard’s own Legacy of Slavery initiative and the Land-Grab Universities website, this class will conduct original research on Harvard’s long history of...
Professor: Adriana Zenteno Hopp T - 3:00pm to 5:45pm
How might Montezuma, the Aztec ruler, or Atahuallpa, the Inca emperor, have told the story of their respective encounters with Europeans? Too often, indigenous voices are not centered when we tell the history of colonial Latin America. This seminar aims to address this issue by exploring how native people living under colonialism understood the pre-Hispanic and early colonial past. Together, we will examine the many ways native people told stories about what had transpired, including the use of oral history, unique...
This course offers an introduction to the complex relationship between Christianity and Indigenous spiritualities in the Pacific, including Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia. Texts in the course will focus on the significance of relationality through the connection between Moana (ocean), Fanua (land), Tagata (people), and Atua (God), and how colonisation has impacted understandings of these key aspects of life. Students will be invited to consider what decolonisation looks like in their own contexts.
This seminar looks at contemporary and historical documentary, narrative, and experimental films made by Indigenous filmmakers and artists. The focus is primarily on North America, but includes works from around the world.
NOTE: To take this limited-enrollment seminar course, please consult the Canvas course site for information about the enrollment process and procedures.
How do gender and sexuality shape Indigenous life? What does it mean for the body to be a site for both colonial violence and imaginative futures? How have constructions, ideas, and aesthetics of gender and sexuality morphed across time and to what consequences for Native people? This course grapples with these questions through an examination of literature and cultural production by Indigenous peoples in North America. Students will be introduced to some of the foundations of settler colonialism, what it is and how it...
The study of North America, at its root, is the study of Native America and African America. Typically, scholarship on the first Americans—and Africans and their descendants—are studied in isolation. Dominant trends in scholarship, journals, academic disciplines, and university departments tend to reinforce these boundaries. And yet, from the dawn of European colonization to the present day, the worlds of Black and Indigenous peoples have collided in ways that have shaped not only the history of each group, but also,...
The first Americans met Europeans on their shores over five hundred years ago. They made the continent theirs millennia prior. And yet, Indigenous Americans are often missing, or misrepresented—in traditional, even contemporary portraits of North America. An introduction to the study of Native North America—and Native American and Indigenous Studies—this course provides a sweeping portrait of the histories and legacies of settler colonialism, war, dispossession, and slavery in the continent; it also reckons with contemporary...
Australian First Nations’ arts and cultural practices and cosmological beliefs span 60,000+ years, with Australian First Nations' Peoples standing firm in the belief that they have been here since deep time associated with Australian First Nations' Ancestral Beings, creation stories and cosmologies. This course explores the diversity of pre-contact, post-contact Australian First Nations' arts and cultural manifestations, from customary to contemporary representations, incorporating diverse media and trans-disciplinary platforms. Critical... Read more about HAA 17G: Australian First Nations Art, Culture and Politics: We have survived
Professor: Bram Wispelwey T, TH - 11:30am to 1:00pm
Health inequities within and between societies are garnering increased attention, but some historical and structural processes are insufficiently considered despite their significant contributions. This course introduces students to the concept of settler colonialism and its health equity implications for indigenous and settler populations. Utilizing case studies from the United States, South Africa, and Palestine/Israel, comparative analyses in this discussion- and lecture-based seminar will elucidate universal and particular... Read more about GHP 264: The Settler Colonial Determinants of Health
This course provides a broad overview of the archaeology of ancient Mexico and Central America, focusing on the Indigenous cultures of highland Mexico such as the Aztecs and Zapotecs, as well as their predecessors and contemporary descendants. Topics include the origins of food production and early cuisine; development of regional exchange networks; rise of towns, temples, and urbanism; emergence of states and empires; and resilience of Indigenous lifeways through conquest and colonial periods. Peabody Museum collections are incorporated... Read more about ANTHRO 1182: People of the Sun: The Archaeology of Ancient Mexico
Professor: Jorge Sanchez Cruz W - 12:45pm to 2:45pm
This course studies the “afterlife” of colonialism, exploring forms of protest that emanate from indigenous territories and subjectivities and within indigenous community-making and knowledge production. From the Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, the Zapatista movement, the Oaxaca Commune, the Bolivian collective Mujeres Creando, to indigenous protests in Venezuela, this course unpacks the relationship between aesthetic practices (such as indigenous video, art, and literary production) and practices of decoloniality found in... Read more about HIST LIT 90 GO: Protest and Decolonization in Latin America and the Caribbean
The first Americans met Europeans on their shores over five hundred years ago. They made the continent theirs millennia prior. And yet, Indigenous Americans are often missing, or misrepresented—in traditional, even contemporary portraits of North America. In this course, Indigenous peoples and perspectives anchor our study of the past and present.
An introduction to Native North America—and Native American and Indigenous Studies—this course will offer a...
This class focuses on Indigenous art from the pre-contact era to the modern day, concentrating on the Great Lakes area and its peripheries. The course will explore enduring iconic symbols used by Indigenous people through time and space to communicate stories, teachings, and information. Attention will be paid to the transference of symbols from one medium to another, such as rock faces to birchbark, quillwork to beadwork, leather to cloth, vermillion to acrylic paints. The art will be viewed from an Indigenous perspective, employing... Read more about HAA 79: Indigenous Art History of the Great Lakes: From the Pictograph to the Beaded Medallion
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...
