Native Studies Minor

ANTH 325 - Native People of the Great Plains Credits: (3)
This course introduces students to the culture and social history of selected tribes of the Great Plains. Special emphasis will be placed upon the historical forces and conflicts that developed on the Plains from the 1700s to the present. Attention will be given to issues of settler colonialism, sovereignty, revitalization movements, treaties, and federal legislation pertaining to American Indians.

ANTH 341 - Ethnographic Fieldwork Credits: (1-6)
Ethnographic Fieldwork prepares students to conduct a guided ethnographic inquiry in a fieldwork setting. Classroom instruction provides an overview of the basics of research design and field methods in cultural anthropology, including techniques in field observation and interviews, fieldnote-taking and organization, qualitative data analysis, and approaches to ethnographic writing. Preparatory materials related to specific cultures are provided during the classroom time before going into the field. Field sites and fieldwork lengths vary. May be repeated if the topic varies.

ANTH 350 - Peoples and Cultures of Mesoamerica Credits: (3)
First inhabited around 8,000 years ago, Mesoamerica has been interpreted as the “cradle of milpa agriculture” in the world, home to the maize-beans-squash-chili pepper agricultural complex, a combination that has sustained from “autonomous sedentary villages” to centralized civilizations. Mesoamerica encompasses populations sharing “cultural traits” based on similar crop productions, religious and calendric traditions, social complexities, trade and warfare practices, in a region covering the Motagua River (Guatemala-Honduras) and the Nicoya Gulf (Costa Rica), in Central America, to the Sinaloa and the Panuco Rivers, in its northmost Mexican part. This course re-examines Mesoamerica’s original definition as a culture area, focusing on people’s own narratives, diasporas and counternational ethnos. This course studies Mesoamerica as a “particular historical tradition of aboriginal cultures” undergoing transformation prior and after Spanish contact, within –and against– colonial and capitalist formations. This course examines its multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic, and multireligious diversity, in complex histories with Indigenous, Mestizo, Ladino, African, and European populations.

ANTH 351 - People, Cultures, and the Environment of Polynesia Credits: (3)
This course introduces the environments and cultures of Oceania and the Polynesian Islands, from the earliest peopling to the post-colonial era. Consideration is given to the culture histories throughout the region, starting with the earliest Pleistocene settlement of Near Oceania, voyaging and settlement of Remote Oceania, the development of Ancestral Polynesian society, and the eventual settlement of the remote Eastern Polynesian triangle. The class focuses on how all Eastern Polynesian societies descended from a common ancestral culture, but how, through time, with isolation and adaptation to differing island environments, each Eastern Polynesian society developed their own unique localized identity.

ANTH 427/527 – Native Peoples of Eastern North America Credits: (3)
This course explores American Indian peoples, cultures, and historical experiences by surveying select communities indigenous to eastern North America (the Eastern Woodlands). Through the lens of historical anthropology, the course materials address issues of culture change, adaptation, and persistence, particularly during the period of Euro-Indian contact and colonization, and later as dependent sovereigns of the United States.

ANTH 459 - Tsenacomoco: Native Archaeology of the Chesapeake Credits: (3)
This class explores the “deep history” of Native Chesapeake societies by tracing a 15,000-year sequence resulting in the Algonquian social landscape of “Tsenacomoco”. We consider Pleistocene-era settlement, hunter-forager cultural ecology, migration, agricultural adoption, chiefdom emergence, and Native responses to colonialism.

 ANTH 470 - Senior Seminar in Native Sovereignty Credits: (4)
This seminar explores the dynamic and co-constitutive relationship between the Indigenous people of North America and the U.S. federal government, with close attention to the ongoing struggle over issues related to tribal sovereignty and identity. Students will connect the historical constructs of colonialism to the direct political action of the mid to late twentieth century and beyond to grasp the renewal and resurgence of tribal sovereignty more fully at the present time. Emphasis will be placed on the role of anthropology in the study of American Indians, shifts in the legal and political framework of the U.S., and its relationships with indigenous peoples.