Storying Escape: Native American Boarding Schools and Media

Catalog description

This First-Year Seminar explores the convergences of storytelling, popular media, and the speculative as it pertains to the histories of Native American Boarding Schools in the United States. How is storytelling, as a practice rooted in Indigenous oral histories, used to disrupt settler narratives of conquest? How do popular media such as television, film, comics, and fiction contend with the violence of the boarding schools? To grapple with these questions, students will read and research federal policy, theory, and archives regarding these schools and the gendered and racialized forms of dispossession they facilitated. In this course, students will have the opportunity to conduct original research, meet with community organizers and to contribute to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition’s digital mapping project as a part of their final projects. No prerequisites, WRIT-designated course.