For the great mass of non-Indian Americans, those who wish not to be Nazis or heirs to Nazism , and whose collective conscience might bestir itself to compel some positive alternation in the colonial relationship were the facts known to them, our present realities remain as far from sight and mind as the history upon which they are predicated...we are mutually confronted with the specter not of simply a present determined by the unrelenting horror of America's past, but a future dictated by the never-quite-acknowledged ugliness of America's present. ...To a very real extent, the key to reversing this process may be fond in achieving the liberation of Native North America, the empire's first victim and in whose ongoing victimization the empire finds the cornerstone upon which the whole of its continued existence ultimately rests.
M. Annette Jaimes, Sand Creek the Morning After, 1992
I offer you the suggestion that we need to reevaluate our thinking. We need to look at the old philosophies and ask ourselves whether that is where we want to put our energies. Or, should we look at other peoples' ways of thinking about the world and its societies, and decide anew how human priorities and human societies might be constructed? We need to give ourselves permission to trust our own thinking and not allow bureaucrats and crazed guys at the pulpit to do our thinking for us. And we need to take this kind of ideology and make it work for us and the land.
PREFACE: This course is designed to give you a glimpse of some of the current issues facing Native Americans in New England. The course is centered on visits by 7 guest faculty, all Native American scholars, who will come to UMASS to discuss their current research. You will have the opportunity to read the work of these scholars, to hear what they have to say and to interact with them. Our aim is to create a dynamic environment in which native and non-native students and faculty can fruitfully explore some of the key issues facing native communities in the New England and to initiate a meaningful dialogue between native and non-native members of the 5-college community. We hope that in the process we will educate ourselves and the larger 5-college community to create a wider awareness of what is happening in Indian country, of the important scholarship being conducted by our visiting faculty, and of the importance of the emerging program in Native American Studies.
The list of guest speakers for this term is as follows:
Melissa Fawcett, Tribal Historian, Mohegan Nation
Tom Doughton, Anthropologist, Clark University
Brent Michael Davids, musician,
Ed Sarabia, Indian Affairs Coordinator, State of Connecticut
John Brown, Sub-chief and historic preservation officer, Narragansett Nation
Gerald Alfred, Political Scientist, Concordia University
Marguerite Smith, Attorney at Law, NY
We do not begin with a fixed theoretical or topical agenda. Rather, our aim is to break free from the constrains of dominant disciplinary discourses. We are not only investigating the state of native studies today, but hopefully interrogating what that state can and should be. We will use this course as an opportunity to consider what kinds of knowledge are important and how t this knowledge might be pursued. The course (we expect) is not like other s that are offered at UMASS. It is facilitated by four members of the UMASS community from 3 different programs. Keene and Paynter are anthropologists, Welburn is from English and Vincent from the Josephine White Eagle cultural center. Just as we have had to confront disciplinary, cultural and gender differences in the way each of us (from the coordinating faculty) sees the world, in order to arrive at this syllabus, so will you have to take up the challenge of working within a classroom environment grounded in cultural diversity. You will have the chance to work with each of us over the course of the term, and while the course is a bit unwieldy in size, we hope to create an environment of community, trust and communication. Most of the responsibility for this falls on you. As a member of this course, you are expected to attend all of the meetings, prepare well for our guests and our discussions, thoughtfully weigh what our guests and other members of the seminar have to say, and to make thoughtful contributions to the dialogue.
FORMAT: The class meets once/week from 2:30 -5:00 in room W-26 Machmer Hall. Beginning Feb 8, we will host a guest speaker as noted below in the syllabus. Students will have completed a modest amount of reading in preparation for each visit. Speakers will address the class on Thursday afternoon and this will be followed by a question and answer session. In the evening our guests will give another talk to the general public in the 5 Colleges. Members of this seminar are encouraged to attend these talks as well. In alternate weeks we will meet to discuss the visit of the previous speaker and to prepare for the next speaker. At these sessions we will break up into small discussion groups with the individual coordinating faculty. At the end of the session we will come back to the larger group to share and compare the results of our small group discussions. In preparation for these discussions students will prepare a short paper analyzing the talk and readings from the previous week (see below)
REQUIREMENTS:
ATTENDANCE AND GROUP WORK (25% of grade): attendance is required at all 12 of the seminar meetings. In addition, all students are expected to attend several of the evening sessions. Students will be divided into teams, each of which will have to facilitate the visits of one of our guests. Facilitation will involve helping host our guests (e.g. showing them around campus) and preparing thoughtful questions for the post-talk discussions. We will tell you more about this in class.
8 SHORT PAPERS (50% of grade). Every other week , students will prepare a short paper in which they integrate the required readings and the guest lecture(s). Papers should serve as a tool for preparing for discussion. While there is no length limit we expect that most papers will fall in the 2-4 page range. Students will also be asked to turn in a final paper which attempts to pull together many of the treads that ran through the lectures and to make sense of the total experience of the seminar. ALL PAPERS MUST BE TYPED.
JOURNAL:(25% of grade) each student must keep a personal journal in which they relate what is happening in the class to events going on outside of the class. (see below for instructions on how to write a journal). You are expected to interact with your journal often, i.e. AT LEAST a couple of times/week. You must begin your journal the first week of class. Your writing must be legible! We will collect the journals once before the mid-term. At this time, we will offer constructive criticism of your journal but we will not grade it. We will collect your journals again near the end of the term for grading. WHEN YOU COME TO VISIT US DURING OUR OFFICE HOURS, PLEASE BE SURE TO BRING YOUR JOURNAL WITH YOU.
GRADING POLICY:
Late Papers:Papers not turned in at the class in which they are due will be penalized one full grade for each week that they are late. If you are absent from class for any reason, you must still arrange to have your paper arrive when it is due.
REQUIRED READINGS: Most of the readings for this class may be found in a course packet available at Collective Copies, 29 S. Pleasant St., Amherst. We have kept the assignments modest so that you will have time to read the material AND to think about it critically. In most instances we recommend that you read twice: once before the speaker arrives and a brief review afterwards. Individual reading assignments are noted in the schedule of events below. For the first week you are also expected to read a short book written by our first speaker. This book is available at Food For Thought Books, 106 N. Pleasant St. On occasion, we will ask you to look at additional readings that we have placed on reserve in the library tower.
[P] in reading packet
[F] purchase at Food For Thought Books
[Res] on reserve
THE AGENDA
The Journal Process:
Your journal represents a major portion of your work in this course-- both from the point of view of how your work is evaluated and from the perspective of your active learning and enhanced understanding. This means that how you work with and through your journal is an important process. We emphasize 'process' here because your journal is not simply a 'product' to be done once, graded and discarded. Rather, it is a means for you to grapple with ideas and experiences, whether those arise from course materials, your own emotional and intellectual conceptions and states, or confrontations with the social world around you. To put that another way, your journal is a mechanism to help you reflect on the historically based and ongoing struggles of native peoples in New England. You use your journal to learn about your understanding of the social forces and power relations and ideologies that enmesh the lives of native peoples in this region and to demonstrate that you can identify, analyze and begin to understand the nature of the social issues that shape life in the Northeast.
You need to interact with your journal on a frequent basis. We ask that you buy two smallish spiral notebooks for your journal: two so that you can keep working while we are reading your journal and smallish, separate notebooks so you can keep your journal with you most of the time and so it does not get mixed up with other materials such as notes from your chemistry course (which we do not want to read). We also ask that you date every entry in your journal, even if an entry is only a sentence. That will help you and us keep things straight and will serve as a reminder to you to make entries regularly. We suggest that you get yourself to write in your journal every day oar at some regular interval, probably by setting a time when you'll do so. Whether you opt for daily, or MWF at midnight or some totally random pattern, you should realize that trying to fill up your journal the day before it is due will not work! Finally, please make you journal legible. Neat handwriting is fine.
Requirements:
Your journal is more than a personal diary. As a general point, remember that you are making observations, analyses and interpretations about historically based and ongoing struggles of native peoples in New England, not just your personal sense of anger, shame, or whatever. Certainly these personal reactions to your participation in this stratified society are real, and relevant if you can see how to connect them to issues raised in this course. We have included some suggestions below for appropriate kinds of entries in your journal and will offer additional suggestions weekly in class.
Types of Entries:
Your entries should be of two types, commentaries and analyses.
Commentary entries are observations and commentaries on the world around us that relate stuff that goes on in class to something outside the class. We want you to look at at lest two realms when you make your observations - that is the world of everyday interactions and the symbolic world constructed by the mass media. For example, in your wanderings around Amherst or Deerfield or Northampton (or perhaps elsewhere in the Valley) you might notice that there are many places that have Native American names. Have you noticed this before? Observing this in itself is useful, but it merits further commentary. What are these names (or who are/were these folk)? Why do these particular places carry these names.? Do you or does anyone else ever think about the connection between names, people and places?
Another example: Images of Native Americans abound in the mass media from Dances With Wolves to current newspaper accounts of native American Casinos in New England. What are any of these these varied accounts saying? Do these representations match or conflict w/ YOUR understandings of native peoples? A commentary on any representation in the mass media would be useful.
Yet another example: Native American sites abound on the world wide web (see below). What's going on at these sites and how does it relate to stuff we're talking about in class. Simply visiting these sites and commenting on what you find could make a useful journal entry.
Analytical Exercises involve 1) answering questions that you raised in your commentaries (doing research to answer questions) or 2) thoughtfully completing some of the exercises listed below. Additional exercises may be presented throughout the term. Here are some analytical exercises you might wish to undertake.
1) Identify yourself in terms of your racial/ethnic group. When did you first become conscious of being a part of this group? How did this awareness come about? How has your sense of identity with this group and/or your feelings about being part of it, changed over time? Now identify yourself in terms of your gender and sexual preference. How has your awareness of this element of your identity developed and/or changed over time? Are there any tensions that result from belonging to more than one identity group?
2) What do you know about Native Americans in the Northeast and how do you know it (what are the sources of this information)? Spend some time elaborating on your images of Northeastern Native Americans and be clear about the various (and sometimes conflicting) sources that have informed your understandings. Does doing this help you better understand a) some of the blind spots in your knowledge and b) what you want to get out of this course?
3) Think about your home town or the town where you currently live. Who are the original residents of that particular piece of the planet. (find out!)? What can you tell us about them (then and now)? What can you find out? How widespread do you think this knowledge is within your town?
4) Attend political events which are aimed at informing the public about the current struggles of Native peoples in the Northeast.. Describe the nature of the event and of the people present. What in this event strikes you as "effective" or "ineffective"?
5) Spend a week observing what people say about Native Americans (in conversation, in the mass media, in literature and wherever.) List your observations. Pay particular attention to whether these are stories about the past, present or future. Are Native peoples represented as active agents in any of these contexts. (verb tense might be a good clue here). Do you see any patterns? What do you think they mean.?
6) Read a report on a current event presented first by a major mainstream news source (e.g., The Globe, the Times, Newsweek, etc. ) and then in a publication directed at a particular racial or gender group (e.g. Akwesasne Notes, Native Americas or Red Ink). Compare and contrast how these different news sources treat the same event? What do these similarities and differences mean?
7. Visit a store that sells Native American material culture. What's being sold? Who's buying? Who are the people who produced it and who is selling it? What can the folk in the store tell you about these items and their cultural significance? Do you see any geographic patterning? Do you see any difference in the way that Native and non-Native materials are marketed and represented? How does this relate to issues of cultural appropriation?
8.. Describe President Clinton's, House Majority Leader Gingrich's or Governor Weld's positions on issues which directly affect Native Americans in the Northeast. Think about health care, child care, education, housing, poverty issues and political autonomy.
Evaluation : you can see you have a lot of leeway to determine what you will put in your journal. The idea is to use it as a tool to engage aggressively the course material and to facilitate your imagination. We will read your journals twice during the term. We will collect them for the fist time, somewhere around midterms. You will receive one week's notice before the collection date . We will give you feedback on the first reading and will only grade the journal after the final reading. Clearly, evaluation is a subjective process. A good journal will have frequent, thoughtful entries, will show a modicum of creativity, and will demonstrate intellectual growth over the semester. To receive a grade of B or better we would expect a journal to have a minimum of 20 quality entries that include both commentaries and analytical exercises. An "A" journal would probably have at least 28 quality entries and would include at least 4 analytical exercises.
PLEASE BE SURE TO WRITE NEATLY!! We expect you to begin your journal during the first week of class.
There is a wealth of material on Native American issues on the INTERNET. You are not required to check any of this out, but you might find some of the information useful and interesting especially if you are already up and active on the NET. Also, please share with us any interesting WEB sites that you come across. If you are not using the INTERNET but would like to get started, see one of the instructors for a Guide to Getting Started.
THE WORLD WIDE WEB (WWW):- Some good starting places for Resources on Native American issues are: