Current Special Topics for the 2016-2017 academic year

American Indian Activism
This course is a study of American Indian activism throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is designed to look beyond the myth that Indian activism rode in on the coattails of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement and show that American Indian activists had been fighting and campaigning on behalf of their communities since the end of the treaty era. It explores the myth of pan-Indianism and frames Red Power as an inter-tribal/trans-national movement focused on nationalistic motifs of culture, community and tradition. It explores self-determination, sovereignty, treaty rights, identity, settler-colonialism, historical trauma, environmentalism, and many other issues at the core of indigenous protest and self-advocacy. The course will highlight the varying methods, intentions, successes, and failures, of the many American Indian & First Nations activists and organizations that fought for Indian rights during the last century and in the present era, and the increasing power of social media in cultural awareness.

American Indian Art
This course presents an overview and analysis of Native American art forms, techniques, and traditions. It will discuss background and interpretation of traditional and contemporary styles and symbols important to both tribal and individual expression. Course includes discussion of tribal arts and crafts associations, markets and exhibitions, and federal laws.

Comparative Indigenous Activism
Since the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples there has been increasing awareness of inter-connected international indigenous issues in non-indigenous settler states. This course will discuss the historic roots of indigenous activism in the 4 countries that initially rejected the Declaration: the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and the growing trans-national indigenous solidarity that is erasing those national boundaries and creating a global indigenous movement.

Indigenous Northern Borderlands
This course is a study of the US/Canadian border from the indigenous perspective. We will look broadly at how the creation of the border has affected indigenous nations from the Pacific coast to the Atlantic, and specifically at Kahnawa:ke (Mohawk), Haudenosaunee (Iroquios), Anishinaabe (Ojibwe), Bodewadmik (Potawatomi), Nehiyaw (Cree), Nakoda (Assiniboine), and Niitsitapi (Blackfoot/feet) communities in the past and present. How does the border intersect with Native nationhood across the 'Medicine Line'? How are these cultural 'interruptions' navigated when one people become separate nations? How does the creation of imperial borders within indigenous lands affect cultural identity and political coherence? How do these cultures render the border invisible in order to maintain their indigenous identities? What is the future for indigenous nationhood in an age of increasingly contentious national border rhetoric?

Native Museum Studies
In collaboration with the Louise and Antoinette Hagener Museum of the Northern Montana Plains Indian, this survey of museum studies introduces students to the history of museums and to debates on the philosophical nature of museums in relation to indigenous peoples. The course covers the types and definitions of museums, including public, private, and tribal. It discusses contemporary practice in museums, and examines current issues in the museum profession in the twenty-first century. The course also contains a practical element in learning how to create and project cultural museum displays, and the role of the museum as a method of cultural preservation. Central to all of the above, and threaded throughout the semester, is a discussion of how indigenous people have been represented in the museum field in the past and present, and how these representations will change in the future as indigenous communities assert more control over the way their stories are told.

Native North American Music
An introduction to the music and dance of the Native peoples of North America. Students will study traditional, regional, and contemporary music forms from the indigenous populations of North America, from the Southwest, Southeast, Plains, Northwest, Hawaii, and Alaska. You will learn the historical development of musical forms from drum, stomp and throat singing, through resistance against dance bans, to more contemporary musical expressions of ceremonial revival, powwow, Native rock, and Native rap/electro/pop music.