3.0

Average Course Rating

What do settler colonists see--and unsee--when they encounter the rich and varied Indigenous homelands in North America and Oceania? What role does their perception and representation of "nature"--including the very construction of "nature" as a distinct category--play in enabling them to displace and imagine that they could replace longstanding Indigenous peoples in what are now the USA, Australia, and Canada? How have Indigenous peoples reiterated and reinvented their own conceptions and experiences of their homelands? This course begins to address these questions in two ways. One, by considering a wide range of representations (narrative fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, film, art, music) by both Indigenous and settler cultural producers in the US, Australia, and Canada from the nineteenth century to the present. Readings may include: Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods; Catherine Parr Traill, The Backwoods of Canada; Barbara Baynton, Bush Studies; Duncan Campbell Scott, New World Lyrics and Ballads; Willa Cather, The Professor's House; Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock; Louise Erdrich, Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country; Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass; Ali Cobby Ackermann, She Is the Earth; Tanya Tagaq, Split Tooth. Two, by facilitating a series of creative reflections on the meaning of students' current occupation of the lands of the Conestoga/Susquehannock, Piscataway, and other Indigenous peoples through embodied research in the local region.