Ethics and Native America: American Indian Literature and Liturgy

Catalog description

This course serves as an introduction to American Indian literature, with three aims: (1) to explore the history and legacy of the nineteenth and twentieth-century devastation of Indian cultures, especially in the Western United States, in the face of 'manifest destiny'; (2) to frame this history and legacy in liturgical terms, that is, in the terms of the loss and/or survival of the 'rituals of ultimate concern' or 'thick practices' that are constitutive of cultural identity; and (3) to use this liturgical lens as a way of confronting the ethical stakes, both past and present, of the relationship between the United States of America and Native America