Native American Literature: An Introduction

Catalog description

This course will serve as an introduction to Native American literature. We will center Native American voices and stories to resist and reject the tradition of U.S. origin stories that perpetuate Native absence in order to produce American national fantasies of democracy, civilization, and progress. Native American novels, short stories, and poetry will be our scenes to reflect on, critique, and contest the ongoing project of settler colonialism in the United States. Our goal is to attend to individual and tribal experiences of life under settler colonialism, and consider the political, social, and psychological conditions that this structure produces. By the end of the course, students will have gained an understanding of Native American history and federal Indian policy, the Native American literary canon, and key debates in the field of Native American Studies.