This course looks at the religious traditions as a source of what Gerald Vizenor (Anishinaabe) calls survivance, the active presence, continuance of stories, and renunciation of dominance by indigenous peoples. Our comparative approach will examine the pre and post contact traditions of the Mexicas in the Valley of Mexico followed by the Algonquian communities of early New England (e.g. Wampanoag, Mohegan, Narragansett, Pequot, et al). Sources will include the wide range of ways religion was preserved and augmented including rituals, texts, oral tradition, and material culture.

This course reads Indigenous Literatures of North America to reflect on, critique, and contest settler colonialism, or the dispossession of land and waters in the attempt to eliminate Indigenous people. It will consider the broader history of Indigenous literary traditions, including alternative forms of literacy such as oral traditions and craftwork, as well as the ongoing cultural resurgence seen in the literary and art worlds. Readings by Native American and First Nations Canadian authors will connect Indigenous histories across time and space invite new ways of thinking about the past, present, and future of the Americas and the World.

This course will examine the U.S. West's place, process, idea, cultural memory, conquest, and legacies throughout American history. The American West has been a shifting region, where diverse individuals, languages, cultures, environments, and competing nations came together. We will examine the West's contested rule, economic production, and mythmaking under Native American Empires, Spain, France, England, individual filibusters, Mexico, Canada, and United States.

The seminar examines a variety of settler colonial contexts in North America and Oceania. After exploring a range of theoretical approaches to the study of colonialism, gender, and sexuality, the course will feature three main case studies: Maori, Oneida, Cherokee, Diné, and Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian). We will then assess how nationalist self-determination struggles negotiate gender and sexual decolonization, focusing on the growing body of work on gender liminality, contested masculinities, Native and Indigenous feminisms, debates regarding same-sex sexuality and marriage, as well as Two-Spirit, Mahu, LGBT, and `Indigiqueer' identities.

How do indigenous cosmologies intersect with American literary histories and archives? This course disrupts familiar accounts of American origins on the eastern seaboard through creation stories and oral literature from the Pacific Coast of North America. Through course readings, we travel from Hawaii to Alaska. We also travel to Juneau, Alaska over spring break. We think about the Indigenous cosmologies present in American archives through a conceptual vocabulary that includes ecologies, beach crossings, oral histories, and diasporas.

This course will look to understand the current and historical role of Indigenous people as a trope in both Western culture and in American culture more specifically, the material effects of such representations and the longstanding resistance to them among Indigenous people, and work toward developing ways of supporting Indigenous sovereignty and futurity. It will include a cross-disciplinary program of learning that will work closely with the Indigenous holdings in Firestone Library.

Creation stories from Turtle Island foreground an integral connection between land and story. "Sky Woman Falling" contains key ecological and environmental knowledge. This course explores the relationship between land and story, emphasizing seeds as sources of sovereignty and repositories of knowledge across generations. We focus on Native New Jersey while understanding the history of this land in the context of global indigeneity and settler colonialism. Course literature engages seeds, land, and the environment from a perspective that crosses the disciplines of American studies, literature, history, ecology, and environmental studies.

This course is designed to introduce students to the historical processes and issues that have shaped the lives if Indigenous Americans over the past five centuries. We will explore the ways that the diverse peoples who lived in the Americas constructed different kinds of societies and how their goals and political decisions shaped the lives of all those who would come to inhabit the North American continent. The course requires students to read and analyze historical documents and contemporary literature, and includes a visit to the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City.

An exploration of the written and oral literary traditions of Native American and Indigenous authors. This course offers an occasion to reflect on, critique, and contest settler colonialism or the dispossession of land and waters and the attempt to eliminate Indigenous people. The course will include a service-learning trip to the Munsee Three Sisters Medicinal Farm and an opportunity to learn some Lenape, the ancestral language of New Jersey.

This course is designed to explore how centering Black and Native/Indigenous feminist epistemologies (ways of knowing), theories, methods, themes, cultural production, and decolonial and abolitionist struggle reorient the field of American Studies. If we orient American Studies around and through Black and Native/Indigenous gendered, sexualized, feminist and queer modes of survival and ingenuity; what themes, debates, and questions rise to the surface and become salient?

Students will be introduced to anthropological and cross-disciplinary studies of multiple, divergent ways in which the Circumpolar populations experience, perceive and respond to environmental, political and socio-economic changes from within distinct horizons of knowledge & modes of sociality. By focusing on social and historical processes as well as current/emerging practices, worlds/cosmologies, the course will analytically evaluate such notions as Anthropocene, the Fourth World, indigeneity and decolonisation as well as examine attempts of various scholars to better understand complex interconnections of climate, environment and society.

Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor notes the word "indian" is a "colonial enactment" that "has no referent in tribal languages or cultures." But as a trope it has long provided Western culture with a vision of romantic primitivism, of savage cruelty, or of the doomed victims of colonial expansion. This course will examine eighteenth-century transatlantic representations of North American Indigenous people and consider the cultural functions of these representations and their role in settler colonialism. In addition to literary texts, we will also examine art and visual culture, collected objects, and philosophical writing from the period.

Working with Princeton's Western Americana collections, students will explore what archives are and how they are made. Who controls what's in them? How do they shape what historians write? Using little studied collections, students will produce online "exhibitions" for the Library website, and research potential acquisitions for the Library collections. Significant time will be devoted to in-class workshops focused on manuscript and visual materials. Special visitors will include curators, archivists, librarians, and dealers.