AMST 231 - Native American Literature

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

(Same as ENGL 231) This course examines Indigenous North American literatures from a Native American Studies perspective. Native American literature is particularly vast and diverse, representing over 500 Indigenous nations in the northern hemisphere, and written/spoken in both Indigenous languages and languages of conquest (English, Spanish, French). Because of this range of written and oral traditions, our goals for the class are to complicate our understanding of “texts,” to examine the origins of and evolution of tribal literatures (fiction, poetry, non fiction, graphic novel, etc.), and to comprehend the various theoretical debates that have created and nurtured a robust field of Native American literary criticism. A Native American Studies framework acknowledges Indigenous literatures as the cultural and creative labor of Native peoples on behalf of their respective Nations or communities, as well as how the literatures are necessarily entangled with the on-going legacy of settler colonialism. Authors include William Apess, Luther Standing Bear, Pauline Johnson, Mourning Dove, Gerald Vizenor, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Silko, Louise Erdrich, Wendy Rose, Thomas King, Beth Brant, Kimberly Blaeser, and Tommy Pico, among other Native theorists, performance and fine artists, and filmmakers. Molly McGlennen.

This course satisfies the Regs requirement for the English major.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS