Native American Architecture

Catalog description

Academic disciplines that discuss Native American pasts (such as archaeology, anthropology, and history) have historically characterized Indigenous peoples of North America by what they supposedly “lack.” Architectural history is no exception. Despite a deep continental history of Native American constructions—whether monumental earthen mounds or effigies, village complexes, roads, or megaliths—Native architecture is often ignored in histories of architecture. Combining archaeological, ethnographic, archival, and oral-historical sources, this course exposes the erasure of Native Americans from architectural history and celebrates the diversity and complexity of Indigenous built environments. We first examine how different academic disciplines have historically studied (and sometimes erased) Native American architecture. Then we will survey Indigenous architecture before settler colonialism. We end the course studying the violence of and resistance to colonialism in North America and how contemporary Indigenous architectural traditions have been shaped in response.