Classes

IGA 671M: Policy and Social Innovations for the Changing Arctic

Semester: 

Winter

Offered: 

2024
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...

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BETH 766: U.S. Eugenics: Legacies and Resurgences

Semester: 

Winter

Offered: 

2024
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

EDU A101/ DEV 501M: Native Americans in the 21st Century: Nation-Building I

Semester: 

Winter

Offered: 

2024
Professors: Joseph Kalt and Angela Riley
M-F - 10:00am to 4:30pm

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 encompasses 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... Read more about EDU A101/ DEV 501M: Native Americans in the 21st Century: Nation-Building I

EDU A410A: Teaching the Hard Histories of Racism in the United States

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024
Professor: Adrienne Stang
TH - 4:30pm to 7:15pm

*Lottery-based Enrollment* Engaging in conversations about racism, past and present, is essential to building bridges and promoting democratic values. Many educators wish to teach about racism but may hesitate to explore controversial topics with students, especially younger learners. In this course, participants develop the knowledge and skills to teach the histories and realities of racism in the United States. We consider the developmental needs of students in grades K-12, racial-ethnic identity development,... Read more about EDU A410A: Teaching the Hard Histories of Racism in the United States

GOV 94MI: Political Life in Canada

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024
Professor: Antonia Maioni
W - 9:45am to 11:45am

This course is an introduction to contemporary political life in Canada that examines key governmental institutions, the parliamentary systems, and how demands are identified and transmitted through the political process. This includes the following: basic structure of government institutions and the political process; federalism; Canadian political culture; political parties and elections; public policy; as well as an introduction to Canadian political debates with regard to diversity, Indigenous peoples, and Quebec.  

HAA 17G: Australian First Nations Art, Culture and Politics: We have survived

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024
Professor: Brenda Croft
M - 3:00pm to 5:45pm

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

GHP 264: The Settler Colonial Determinants of Health

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024
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

ANTHRO 1182: People of the Sun: The Archaeology of Ancient Mexico

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024
Professor: Bill Fash
W - 9:00am to 11:45am

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

HIST LIT 90 GO: Protest and Decolonization in Latin America and the Caribbean

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024
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

EMR 1030: Topics in Native American and Indigenous Studies: Native North America

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024
Professor: Mandy Izadi
M, W - 1:30pm to 2:45pm

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...

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HAA 79: Indigenous Art History of the Great Lakes: From the Pictograph to the Beaded Medallion

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024
Professor: Alan Corbiere
T, TH - 1:30pm to 2:45pm

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

EMR 160: Environmental Practices and Indigenous Knowledge Systems

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024

Professor: Americo Mendoza-Mori
M, W - 3:00pm to 4:15pm

Throughout centuries, Indigenous communities have developed knowledge systems and practices that allow them to foster meaningful connections with natural environments and the earth. By conveying tradition with innovation, Indigenous societies from across the world engage with pressing topics such as social and environmental justice, climate change, decolonization, human rights, education, etc. For instance, while Indigenous peoples make up only 6% of the world's total population, they protect 80% of the planet’s...

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ENGLISH 90JI: Not Vanishing: Indigenous Literary Theory and Criticism

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024
Professor: Daniel Heath Justice
Th - 9:00am to 11:45am

The past forty years have seen significant methodological and theoretical shifts in the scholarly field of Indigenous literary studies, moving from ethnographically inflected outsider analyses of culture and identity or as extensions of nation-state literatures to Indigenous-grounded concerns of peoplehood, land, language, and sovereignty in intellectual and artistic production. The range of literary forms, genres, issues, and regions represented in the scholarship has increased dramatically as well, as has attention to... Read more about ENGLISH 90JI: Not Vanishing: Indigenous Literary Theory and Criticism

ENGLISH 187ND: Indigenous Literatures of the Other-than-Human

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024
Professor: Christopher Pexa
M, W - 12:00pm to 1:15pm

“Indians are an invention,” declares an unnamed hunter in Gerald Vizenor’s (White Earth Ojibwe) 1978 novel, Bearheart. The hunter’s point, as Vizenor has explained in interviews and elsewhere, is not that Indigenous peoples don’t exist, but that the term “Indian” is a colonial fiction or shorthand that captures, essentializes, and thus erases a vast diversity of Indigenous lives and peoples. This course begins from the contention that other categories, and maybe most consequentially that of “nature,” have not only... Read more about ENGLISH 187ND: Indigenous Literatures of the Other-than-Human

ENGLISH 297CI: Critical Indigenous Theory

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2024
Professor: Chris Pexa
W - 9:00am to 11:45am

This seminar gives a broad overview of key theoretical interventions in the emergent, international, and interdisciplinary field of Critical Indigenous Studies. Our exploration will begin with the emergence of American Indian Studies as an academic discipline in the 1970s and 80s, tracking its development over the next twenty years into increasingly global articulations of Indigenous studies and, more recently, of critical Indigenous studies as “a knowledge/power domain whereby scholars operationalize Indigenous knowledges to develop... Read more about ENGLISH 297CI: Critical Indigenous Theory

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