Hidden Pasts & Indian Lands: Transfer, Dispossession, Reclamation — Fall 2018

Every university campus in North America sits on indigenous lands, which have at some point been dispossessed to make room for settlers and their institutions. We often know little about the people who inhabited the land or about how land trade and dispossession actually happened, and we know even less about the ongoing indigenous attempts to reclaim these lands. In this course, students will seek answers to these questions and develop a larger sense of the economic, cultural, and legal history of tribal lands in North America. They will learn about legal and indigenous conceptions of property, how the concept of "secure private property" has been used to dispossess tribes/nations of their lands, and how they use their histories of dispossession in their attempts to reclaim territory. Students will use archival materials to produce websites that will document these untold stories of land trade, dispossession, and attempts to reclaim the lands on and around their campuses.