Indigenous Literature will be offered beginning in the 2022-23 academic year.

Indigenous History will be piloted as an elective during the 2021-22 academic year.

INDIGENOUS LITERATURE 

The Land is Everywhere or Nowhere: Hybrid Forms in Indigenous Literature

This course explores how Native Nations authors use hybrid literary forms to narrate lives and histories fragmented by settler-colonialism. The course begins with a contemporary novel, There, There, by Tommy Orange, which engages with loss and memories of loss in the lives of indigenous peoples in Oakland, California. Orange organizes the narrative into non-fiction vignettes and fictional essays. Students explore the connection between the experiences of Orange’s characters, Orange himself, and the resulting creative form. Following There, There, students read poetry from Native Nations poets across time and form, including oral literature; the poetry of Eleazer, an indigenous student at Harvard in the seventeenth-century; and contemporary poets like Tommy Pico, Jake Skeets, and Natalie Díaz. Students explicitly interrogate the relationship between the effects of settler-colonialism and literary form, and how the shape of language can reclaim histories violently erased. 

The course culminates in a study of the work of Two-Spirit artists and activists, rooted in the contemporary anthology, Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literature. Students investigate the meaning of “Two-Spirit”and the ways indigenous and tribal-specific gender constructions have resisted settler-colonial society. As a final project, students use the literature of various Native Nations anthologies, performance art, documentary, and other sources to investigate one specific decolonization project within a contemporary Native Nation. Their research results in a long-form essay and presentation to their school community. 

INDIGENOUS HISTORY

“The Surround”: Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Resistance

This course attempts both a broad historical overview of US settler colonialism—spanning from 16th Century intra-European colonial conquest to contemporary US affairs—as well as a rigorous theoretical exploration of the term “settler colonialism”: its associated practices, ideologies, political economies, and metaphysics. At the same time, students examine the long history of indigenous resistance on Turtle Island and grapple with various approaches to the concepts and practices of indigeneity and decolonization. We pay particular attention to contemporary indigenous movements and their international connections, as well as the interventions of thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, Kim Tallbear, and others. Ultimately, students are asked to consider a decolonial horizon in both highly concrete and theoretical terms.

Throughout the course, we pair accessible primary and secondary narratives and analyses with excerpts from denser, more challenging works. Core texts include An Indigenous People’s History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Our History is the Future by Nick Estes, and The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save our Earth by the Red Nation.