Syllabus: Native American Women

This course covers works of Indigenous North American Women through an examination of native and nonnative historical and contemporary oratory, argument, letters, addresses, and texts. From the influence of precolonial indigenous culture on Native women’s lives, through colonization via slavery, force of weaponry, policies of removal, allotment and disease, to such turn of the century works of Laura Cornelius Kellogg and Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, and contemporary writings of Alice Kehoe, Winona Laduke, Annette Jaimes, Wilma Mankiller, Clara Sue Kidwell, Laura Whitt, and Marilou Awiakta, we explore the interplay of Native women’s voices. We learn how Native women have influenced American women’s lives, and how certain philosophical concepts like gender, race, class, nation, genocide, indigenism, and progress, have impacted Native women’s lives. Traditional and contemporary North American Indigenist Women’s values will be examined in contexts of survival, ecology, law, reproduction, and education