2025-26 Indigenous Related Courses

Indigenous peoples across Turtle Island and the Pacific Islands are fighting to revitalize Indigenous languages, uphold tribal sovereignty, and combat violence against Indigenous women, among many other struggles. This course shines a light on contemporary Indigenous activism and investigates social justice through the lens of Indian Country, asking questions like: What tools are movements using to promote Indigenous resurgence? And what are the educational, gendered, environmental, linguistic, and religious struggles to which these movements respond? Students will acquire an understanding of contemporary Indigenous movements, the issues they address, and the responsibilities of non-Native people living on Indigenous lands.

This course explores historical and legal contexts in which Native Americans have practiced their religions in the United States. Making reference to the cultural background of Native traditions, and the history of First Amendment law, the course explores landmark court cases in Sacred Lands, Peyotism, free exercise in prisons, and sacralized traditional practices (whaling, fishing, hunting) and critically examines the conceptual framework of “religion” as it has been applied to the practice of Native American traditions. Service projects will integrate academic learning and student involvement in matters of particular concern to contemporary native communities.

This course explores the legal, cultural, and environmental foundations of Tribal and Indigenous environmental stewardship and natural resource management. Students will examine the historical significance of treaties, Tribal sovereignty, and federal trust responsibility, as well as key laws that have shaped Tribal resource use. The evolution of Tribal co-management with federal and state agencies will be analyzed through case studies, highlighting challenges and successful partnerships. Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and Indigenous worldviews on land stewardship will complement critical discussions on climate change, environmental justice, and the ongoing balance between economic development and ecological sustainability in Tribal resource use. 

As a field that is truly interdisciplinary, archaeology uses a wide range of methods to study the past. This course provides a hands-on introduction to the entire archaeological process through classroom, field, and laboratory components. Students will participate in background research concerning local places of historical or archaeological interest; landscape surveying and mapping in GIS; excavation; the recording, analysis, and interpretation of artifacts; and the publication of results. This course involves real archaeological fieldwork, and students will have an opportunity to contribute to the history of the local community while learning archaeological methods applicable all over the world.

During registration, students will register for both the lecture and a corresponding lab section, which will appear on the student's academic transcript in a single entry.

This course examines the formation of Iberian colonial societies in the Americas with a focus on the lives of “ordinary” people, and the ways scholars study their lived experience through the surviving historical record. How did indigenous people respond to the so-called Spanish conquest? How did their communities adapt to colonial pressures and demands? What roles did African slaves and their descendants play in the formation of colonial societies? How were racial identities understood, refashioned, or contested as these societies became ever more globalized and diverse? These and other questions will serve as the starting point for our study of the origins and formation of contemporary Latin America.

This course introduces students to the history of settler education for Indigenous students. In the course, we will engage themes of resistance, assimilation, and educational violence through an investigation of nation-to-nation treaties, federal education legislation, court cases, student memoirs, film, fiction, and artwork. Case studies will illustrate student experiences in mission schools, boarding schools, and public schools between the 1600s and the present, asking how Native people have navigated the educational systems created for their assimilation and how schooling might function as a tool for Indigenous resurgence in the future.

What are the origins of our species? How did our ancestors evolve in Africa and disperse to nearly every corner of the globe? How did people create tools and homes, transform landscapes, and build cities? What are the origins of art? Of agriculture? Of mass-transport and communication technologies? Writing is about 5000 years old, meaning over 99% of the human past (c. 4 million years) is documented only through the material record of fossils, artifacts, and environmental impacts. This course examines the material worlds of humanity, and how archaeology provides a unique, “big-picture” story of our shared past.

Through films, short stories and novels, we analyze how plants like ayahuasca, peyote, and coca are at the intersection of exploitation, psychedelia, sacred practices and ecological awareness. We examine how the representations of plants in literature and cinema address biopiracy, colonialism, and the commodification of sacred plants. Also, we will study how indigenous communities preserve ancestral knowledge and resist environmental destruction. Students will critically reflect on the connections between storytelling, plant-based medicine, and contemporary environmental challenges in Latin America and beyond.

Come explore the world of feathered serpents, smoking mirrors, flower songs, and water mountains! This course examines from multiple disciplinary perspectives the Nahuatl-speaking people of central Mexico under both Aztec and early Spanish rule (spanning approximately the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries). Students will gain experience working with a range of sources produced by Nahua authors, scribes, and artists, including ritual calendars, imperial tribute records, dynastic annals, and translated documents. The College’s rich collection of Mesoamerican codex facsimiles will play a prominent role in our investigation. No prior knowledge is required or expected.

The Arctic world faces enormous interconnected environmental challenges. Climate change, wildlife threats, toxic pollution, human livelihoods and cultural practices – all of these and many more are colliding at a time when the region is also responding to shifting economic, geopolitical, and technological forces. This course will consider the deeper historical nature of these intertwined eco-cultural developments over the past two centuries, giving particular attention to animals and marine life, energy and mining, Indigenous resource strategies and well-being (including exploring Carleton’s Inuit art prints), storytelling and meanings, and ideas and policies focused on conservation, sustainability, and environmental justice.

Recommended Preparation: HIST 205

Indigenous presence in North America pre-dates the United States by millennia and persists in spite of colonial attempts to eliminate Indigenous peoples. As Part I of the Indigenous Histories in the United States survey, we begin with Indigenous Knowledges of place, time, and identity since time immemorial. We then move through thousands of years of stories of diplomacy, captivity, colonialism, resistance, removal, and reconstitution. We conclude in the mid-1880s, a drastic period of change for lands, humans, and more-than-human relations. This course takes an ethnohistorical approach which centers Indigenous perspectives and draws on History, Indigenous Studies, and Anthropology.

This course re-frames Dance history and practice through the lens of “performance as ceremony,” foregrounding embodied knowledge as a site of cultural memory, resistance, and futurity. Students will examine Indigenous, Africanist, Latinx, and Asian modernisms, centering choreographers, performers, and theorists who challenge dominant narratives and the legacies of cultural appropriation. With particular attention to Indigenous contemporary performance and its cultural and historical contexts, students will engage in seminar discussions, embodied research, and site-based performance practices. Indigenous guest artist/scholar visits, and attendance at performances will be part of the class.

For many Indigenous peoples, land is a relative, a teacher, and a source of knowledge. This seminar examines Indigenous relationships with land through the writings of Native authors, scholars, and activists, exploring Traditional Ecological Knowledge, stewardship, and environmental challenges. We will consider how Indigenous knowledge informs responses to climate change, land use, biodiversity loss, and other environmental threats, while also recognizing land and non-human beings as active participants in cultural and ecological systems. Through a reading-group format, discussions will foster critical reflection and connections to broader environmental issues. Students will also conduct an independent research paper, applying course themes to a focused topic of inquiry.

This course examines ancient peoples of the large, geographically and culturally diverse region of Latin America. Focused on Central America, South America, and the Caribbean, we will examine the material culture of Indigenous peoples from c. 20,000 years ago to the time of European contact (1500 AD), including the Olmec, Maya, Aztec, Moche, Inka, Taíno, and Rapa Nui peoples. Themes include migration, the environment, settlement, long-term social change, and daily life. We will also review current debates and ethical issues, with an emphasis on Indigenous perspectives and cross-disciplinary dialogues between archaeology and related fields.

This course focuses on special topics in the public sociology of religion.  We will look at the intersection of race, religion, and politics in the U.S.; the intersection of science and religion in Indigenous-led environmental and land back movements; secular and Islamic feminism in Egypt and Indonesia; and democracy, secularism, and religious tolerance in Indonesia, Egypt, and globally.  As we do so, we will examine core theoretical perspectives and empirical developments in the contemporary study and sociology of religion.

Recommended Preparation: Completion of SOAN 110 or SOAN 111 with a grade of C- or better.

The Mexican Revolution was the twentieth-century’s first major social and political upheaval and a watershed moment in Latin American history. This course examines the factors that precipitated the conflict, as well as its main domestic and international dimensions. It explores how an official myth of “The Revolution” was created and contested by the Mexican state, artists, intellectuals, and peasants through the means of education, murals, photography, protest, commemorations, and shrines. The mythification of martyred agrarian leader and rebel chieftain Emiliano Zapata will be examined. Students will work with the College’s collection of Mexican silkscreen posters created in commemoration of the ninetieth anniversary of Zapata’s assassination in 1919.