Overview
Nathan Goodale (Director)
Brianna Burke
Mackenzie Cooley
Pete Guiden
Seth Schermerhorn
The American Indian and Indigenous Studies program is both interdisciplinary and extradisciplinary, spanning academic departments, disciplines, and fields of inquiry to integrate Indigenous ways of knowing and knowledge across the curriculum. The program will provide learning opportunities through an innovative, community-based, and reciprocal partnership with the Oneida Indian Nation. Learning opportunities within AIIS will contribute to honoring the 1793 Promise – the foundation and establishment of the Hamilton-Oneida Academy through a gift from the Oneida Indian Nation.
Students will learn to:
- Recognize the significance of different forms of knowledge produced by Indigenous leaders, writers, artists, or activists within its cultural and historical context.
- Describe historical events and cultural contexts that shaped Indigenous communities prior to colonial contact
- Analyze specific examples of Indigenous peoples’ encounters with different forms of colonialism and assess their immediate impacts.
- Interpret the long-term consequences of colonialism for Indigenous communities across historical and contemporary periods.
- Explain how contemporary Indigenous communities assert agency, practice sovereignty, and envision future futures in response to ongoing colonial structures.
The minor in American Indian and Indigenous Studies consists of five courses including two Core Courses and three Context Courses. Core Courses have 100% of the content represented as American Indian or Indigenous voices/texts or American Indian and/or Indigenous issues where the course is fully embedded in American Indian or Indigenous Studies disciplines. Context courses are defined where approximately 1/3 (or a sizable unit) of the course content is represented as American Indian or Indigenous voices/texts or in which American Indian and/or Indigenous issues are included in a broader conversation. At least one of the five courses must be at the 300 level.
Core Courses: Choose two courses
AMST-105 Introduction to Native American Studies
AMST-128 Indigenous Lifeways
AMST/RELST-129 Native American Spiritualities
AMST/ENVST-310: Indigenous Ecologies
ENVST/LIT-265: Indigenous North American Literature
GOVT-305: Native and Indigenous Political Thought
Context Courses: Choose three courses
AMST-203: American Pilgrimages
AMST-239: Native American Religious Freedom
ARCH-243: North American Archaeology
ENVST/LIT-269: Climate Fiction and Film
ENVST/LIT-392: Decolonizing the Anthropocene
ENVST/LIT-393: Multispecies Kinship
HIST-105 Latin America: History, Society, Culture
HIST/HSPST-126 Conquest of the Americas
HIST/MDRST-225 Scientific Revolution: Making Knowledge in the Early Modern World
HIST-327 Mexico-Tenochtitlan: The City and the World, 1300-1800
HIST-351 Race, Science, and the Origins of the Modern World
HIST/ENVST/MDRST-355 Bioprospecting and Ecologies of Medicine