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American Indian Studies Fall Semester 2008
AMST 58: Cultures of Dissent: The American Indian Experience Section 1: Tol Foster 9:00 MWF, 204 Murphey Last year the United Nations voted to create a Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Only four countries – the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia – voted against the proposal. These four countries, despite their democratic legal systems, are all settler-populated colonial governments which have imposed their government over that of the original indigenous inhabitants of the land. For the United States, a “land of immigrants,” American Indians represent perhaps the greatest “problem” for the articulation of the United States as a place of equality and freedom, for unlike other constituents of the country, the validity of the nation’s claims depend on the abrogation of those of their own sovereign nations. This course focuses in a concentrated way on the experience of American Indians as colonized people under a democracy, with the understanding that they, both as individuals and as sovereign tribal governments, represent a unique challenge for a contractual democracy. At times, victories for American Indians in United States courts have meant greater freedom for other Americans, as with religious freedom; at other times, their legal status as “domestic dependant nations” has meant that they are beholden to a capricious federal government determined to exploit their resources and deny them redress. Through a number of texts, drawing heavily from legal documents, histories, documentaries, and critical scholarship, this course will focus on three major areas that dramatize the distinct status of American Indians in the United States: the land, tribal sovereignty, and American Indian personhood. In considering the land, we will study how it is that the United States was able to appropriate American Indian tribal homelands, throughout American history, such that the Bureau of Indian Affairs still administers roughly 56 million acres of tribal land and the rest has passed largely from indigenous to non-indigenous owners. In considering tribal sovereignty we will be tracing the ways in which tribes are, and are not, like other governments, such that they can build casinos (some of them, anyway) but they cannot build nuclear weapons, for example. We will also consider, as a part of this discussion, the federal and state recognition of tribal nations such as the Lumbee and Eastern Band of the Cherokee in North Carolina, and the processes and problems of such distinctions. Finally, we will consider the gradual emancipation of American Indian individuals from their status as enemies, wards of the state and objects of scientific study, de-tribalized and racially quantified citizens, and finally as dual citizens of the United States. In addition to a series of short papers and projects assigned based on the readings of the course, the instructor will direct a discipline-specific final research project tailored to the interests of each student in the course.
AMST 110: Native North America Section 6: Theda Perdue 12:00 MWF; 211 Chapman This interdisciplinary course draws from history, archaeology, cultural anthropology, law and public policy, art, music, film, and literature to introduce students to the major themes that have shaped the lives of North American Indians. The course also will deal with U.S. Indian policy, the relations between Indians and non-Indians, and the relations between various Indian peoples.
AMST 233: Western Native Americans Section 1: Michael Green 2:00 TR, 103 Bingham This course explores the histories of American Indians who lived west of the Mississippi from the archaeological past to the end of the 19th century. Using an ethnohistorical methodology, the course will discuss and explain relations between Native groups, the European invasion and the responses of Indians, the development of the Plains Indian culture, and the expansion into the West by the United States. The course will end with the development of the allotment policy. AMST 246: Introduction to the American Indian Literatures Section 1: Tol Foster 11 MWF; 220 Peabody This survey course will set out the context of Native American cultural and historical life through the exploration of literature in a variety of genres. Native critical terms and concepts, as well as major historical moments in Native history, will be elucidated through oral literature, non-fiction, poetry, short stories, film, and novels, primarily drawn from the twentieth century, and from tribal groups of the continental United States. Although minor texts and authors will be included, major writers and texts will include Charles Eastman (Indian Boyhood) Leslie Marmon Silko (Storyteller), Pretty Shield (Pretty Shield), LeAnne Howe (Shellshaker), Thomas King (Green Grass, Running Water), and Sherman Alexie’s film The Business of Fancy Dancing. AMST 499: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of Native Food Section 1: Rayna Green, Lehman-Brady Visiting Professor of Documentary Studies at UNC and Duke 3:30 – 5:50 W, 204 Murphey This course brings together people interested in Native American and American Studies, Food Studies, Environmental Studies, Anthropology, History, Folklife, Cultural Geography, and , well, food. The description below is a topical listing for some of the things that will occupy us during the semester. Mother Corn meets the Dixie pig and Marco Polo’s Chinese noodles meet marinara sauce at the global grocery: the influence of Native food on American, regional, and global foodways; Native and American: how Native food shaped regional, ethnic, and national identities; the expropriation and reject of Native, Native food, and Native identity; Land, people, and Native food: the politics, economics, cultures, and geographies of food, in the South, the Southwest, the Pacific Northwest, the Great Lakes, Alaska, Oklahoma, California; Cane Sieves and Iron Pots: the material culture of Native food, tradition and change; Natural history and human history: plants, animals, and people, fishing, hunting, subsistence living, growing; species and human diversity; environment disaster and revitalization; Food fights: land, water, and war, salmon, (save the) whales, buffalo, Bambi, corn, wheat, and wild rice; The last Thanksgiving: blood and sugar/diabetes, corn and pellagra, dietary changes and nutritional disasters; the locavoracious eat grits and recover; Nacho Nation: the other Native food(s) in and of El Norte. There will be lectures, class discussions, field and library research, local documentation (yes, we will find our subject on the campus yard, groceries, restaurants, farmer’s markets, and local byways), and perhaps, even some gathering, cooking, and consumption of our subject.
AMST 878/HIST 878: Readings in Native American History Section 1: Michael Green 6:00-8:50 R; 204 Murphey GRADUATE STUDENTS ONLY This readings seminar is open only to graduate students. We will meet weekly to discuss key issues in American Indian history and the scholarly literature that relates to them.
ANTH 230 NATIVE AMERICAN CULTURES Valerie Lambert 9:30-10:45 TR, 203 Alumni This course is a broad survey of contemporary American Indian societies and cultures in the territory that is now known as the United States. Film, autobiography, literature, current issues, guest speakers, archaeological evidence and history help expose the multiple perspectives that characterize American Indian life today. This course is designed to provide you with a working knowledge of American Indians and American Indian life in the United States. You will gain a background in American Indian history and policy; explore the tremendous diversity of American Indians, both within and across tribes; and have the opportunity to read selections written by American Indians of different tribes. This course is built around case studies and the analysis of current issues. Foundations are provided by an introductory section that addresses American Indian prehistory, the European colonial period and the American period of American Indian history and experience. A&S Non-Western/Comparative perspective, Social Sciences perspective, Cultural Diversity requirement.
ANTH 450 North American Archaeology
AMST 259: Tobacco and America Section 1: Tim Marr 10:00 MWF; 217 Peabody This interdisciplinary APPLES course examines a plant of great local importance to focus on changing histories of land use, social rituals, gendered leisure, commercial marketing, public health, and global capitalism. We will explore different cultures of tobacco in America ranging from traditional Native American ceremony, to the economy of the South, up to recent battles in the courts over public exposure and regulation. The course will consider diverse perspectives from agriculture, epidemiology, literature, popular music and film, folklore, labor and legal history, advertising and material culture. Please note that the central learning in this course will emerge from an engaged long-term service project with a community institution addressing key tobacco-related issues in North Carolina today.
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