Indigenous History of North America

This course is an introduction to the history of the Native peoples of North America.  Instruction will focus on the idea that indigenous people in North America possess a shared history in terms of being forced to respond to European colonization, and to the emergence of the modern nation-state.  Native peoples, however, possess their own distinct histories and culture.  In this sense, their histories are uniquely multi-faceted rather than the experience of a singular racial or ethnic group.  Accordingly, this course will offer a wide-ranging survey of the Indigenous history of North America with a particular focus on the encounters between the Native peoples or nations of this continent and the European empires, colonies, and emergent modern nation-states attempting colonize their homelands. This course will also move beyond the usual stories of Native-White relations that center either on narratives of conquest and assimilation, or stories of cultural persistence in the face of a dominant Euro-American culture.  We will take on these issues, but we will also explore the significance and the centrality of Native peoples to the historical development of modern North America.  Rather than thinking along a continuum of conquest and resistance we will explore Indigenous history through the lens of survivance, the active presence and continuance of Native stories, cultural adaptation, and history making. This will necessarily entail an examination of race formation, and a study of the evolution of social structures and political and social categories such as nation, tribe, citizenship, and sovereignty which continue to define and shape the lives of Native peoples in the present day.