Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Site: http://gwstindgtamez.blogspot.com
PRE-REQUISITES
Either: INDG 100. 3 additional credits of INDG courses at the 200-level; and third-year
standing. Or: Third-year standing and 6 credits of GWST or WMST.
SUMMARY: This course will provide important research methods, critical analysis tools, and
crucial perspectives which directly challenge mainstream stereotypes, norms, practices, and
prejudices which clutter and disarm a more productive and potent way of seeing,
comprehending, and thinking about Indigenous Peoples, and a group often subsumed within that
category – Indigenous Women. That critical location will guide our process, where we begin, and
where we will conclude the course. Here are a few core discursive frameworks to begin the
process: ‘Decolonization’, ‘Human Rights’, ‘Empty Lands/Terrenos Baldios’, ‘Savages/Barbaros’,
‘Enemies’, ‘Vanishing Indians,’ ‘We the People,’ ‘Rights,’ ‘Aboriginal Title and Sovereignty’, and
‘Gender Oppression/Violence.’
This course uniquely positions the advanced student to synthesize critical tools acquired to date,
and to apply them in more rigorous ways in ‘localized’ ways. Students will be expected to direct
their projects towards specific communities, issues, problems, and challenges that are situated in
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contemporary local-global conflicts. Students will situate themselves as researchers and active
agents within those. Special emphasis will be given to the diverse ways that Indigenous peoples
—particularly the multiply marginalized within Indigenous communities—have historically
resisted and given voice to community-based, collective analysis of colonization, gender and
sexual violence, and their broad-based, coalitional and anti-colonial movements. Globalization,
development, militarization & migration are key frameworks to inform a gender analysis (the
production and enforcement of heteropatriarchal and violent masculinities and femininities) at
the intersections of geopolitics produced and reproduced through oppressive systems and
methods.
‘NORTH AMERICAS’: We will narrow our focus on particular geopolitical and gendered
terrains, and this opens up critical space specifically to analyze, critique and interrogate Mexico,
Canada and the U.S. from Indigenous and Indigenous-gendered perspectives. From early
colonial ‘conquests’ to NAFTA, the WTO, and global Indigenous movements and beyond--by
interrogating alternative ‘contact’ perspectives, (vis-à-vis a strong emphasis on Indigenous
Peoples’ and Indigenous-focused scholarship, oral testimonials, literacies, knowledge systems,
primary documents, legal histories, etc.), we will utilize texts and contexts to guide us.
In that vein, ‘North Americas’—and its discontents—allows for a framework which foregrounds
multiplicity and diversity of Indigenous experiences---disaggregating Indigenous peoples from
homogenizing limits imposed by heteropatriarchal states—as well as nations-within-nations.
Using ‘gender’ and ‘indigeneities’ to gird up our analysis, we will confront the ideologies and
regimes which naturalize fixed and linear notions of ‘Indians/Indios/Natives’ and interrogate
these as monolithic symbols of Euro-American conquering methods. We will confront Euro-
American legal constructions of tribalisms, indigenisms, Indian ethnicities, Indigenous ‘haves’
and ‘have-nots’, borders, nations, and sovereignty as normative and thereby innately
discriminatory and full of high risk for Indigenous peoples today.
In this, by interrogating history, law, science, and politics through Indigenous peoples’ lenses and
social movements, the processes and outcomes of state-craft , capitalist democracy, assimilative
development projects , and militarization will be elevated in order to engage in the situations and
challenges that a wide spectrum of Indigenous peoples face. Testimonies and testaments from
Indigenous peoples’ themselves will unravel the myths that enshrine colonization as always
predestined and inevitable.
DECOLONIZING ‘NORTH AMERICA’: We will place very strong emphasis on decolonizing the
narratives, imaginaries, lands, resources and bodies within and across the boundaries produced
at the intersections of Euro-American nation-states and heteronormative citizenship (of both non-
Indigenous and Indigenous societies). We will examine forces, actors, and organizations which
promote the maintenance of oppression and repression as dual forces to marginalize Indigenous
decolonial movements across society and borders.
At the same time, we will interrogate how/when/where colonialist methods got adopted and
assimilated into Indigenous societies and governance in unquestioning ways, and we examine
key Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholarship which investigate Indigenous peoples’ challenges
to disrupt and dismantle these regimes and forces of colonial violence. In that vein, we pay close
attention to the lingering consequences for marginalized Indigenous peoples at the fringes of the
Euro-settler nation-state and normative Indigenous nations—women, children, GLBTQ folk,
migrants, refugees, differently abled, mixed ancestry, incarcerated, economically deprivated,
and elders.
Decolonizing North Americas emphasizes the multiplicity of lenses about who and what
‘the Americas’ was prior to 1492 and is, and how Indigenous peoples are using
diverse tools to interrogate the legal, scientific, and cultural obsession of elites and the
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privileged to possess and commodify Indigenous lands, bodies and knowledge systems to the
isolation and deprivation of certain groups. Heteropatriarchy, capitalism, globalization and
militarization will be four interlocking systems which will help us to elevate multiply-marginalized
Indigenous peoples’ knowledges, and the increasing move by elites to censure and flatten the
everyday realities of Indigenous resistances to and negotiations and accommodations with
violent, assimilative systems.
Our lenses will also ‘zoom-in’ on raced, gendered, sexualized, and classed imaginaries of ‘North
American’ ‘natives’, ‘Indians’, ‘Indios’, ‘Indigenas’, ‘Mixed-bloods’, ‘Mestizos’ and Métis as
territorializing methods in the gendered and raced projects of colonizations. While ‘North
America’ as Mexico, Canada and U.S. artificially (!) imposes limits to the scope of our work and
problematically curtails the examination of Euro-American colonizations to the (equally
problematic) meta geography of ‘North America’ as ‘land mass’ , it should be understood to only
signify a starting point for emancipating colonialist borders and mappings of Indigenous
American realities as intricately tied relationships intertwining peoples, waters, lands, histories
and activities in dynamic relationships with one another. Today’s divisions and differences
between Indigenous peoples should not signify that this always was (to this degree) or that
intense conflict, fear, and even apathy and hatred is predestined, preordained or irrevocable.
[The immense damage inflicted by racist and sexist notions emanating from 19th c. / early 20th c.
U.S.-centric and hegemonic ‘Plains Indian’/‘Southwest Indian’/’American Indian’, is a particularly
bounding space where the patriarchal and patrilineal nation-state has instituted ‘Indian male
head’ as ‘custom’ and a measure for authenticity, and which, sadly, large numbers of Indigenous
peoples have deeply internalized and acculturated.
Within projects to territorialize minerals, oil, water, arable lands, bodies, and knowledges across
Mexico, Canada and the U.S., crucial sectors of Indigenous Peoples’ histories, languages,
perspectives, and experiences have been made artificially invisible. In this course our aim is to
unpack these, especially voices breaking silence at the fringes of Indigenous communities. This
course will maintain firm pressure on elevating Indigenous visibility in all its diversity, and
likewise confronting the forces of marginalization which impose regimes of dispossession and
disavowal upon Indigenous groups which dissent against conformity imposed by colonialist
systems.
Indigenous peoples and their multiple positionalities, particularly individuals, groups, and sectors
at the fringes of citizenship, have and are continuing to maintain large, intact and vibrant
community-based and land-based identities. How, by whom, and where is this occurring and
what tools are Indigenous peoples utilizing and innovating to breathe new life into their
communities beyond physical, gendered, raced, sexist, and imperialist borders? We look closely
at the many ways Indigenous peoples have/are organized over time and space and place to
develop re-newed and new social organizations, revive and reinvent Indigenous community-
controlled governance, innovate and re-member ancestral economic and ceremonial traditions,
and how infusing these are central to Indigenous women’s and their family members’ self-
determined human rights beyond borders.
DECOLONIZING MYTHS & FICTIONS: Another central objective will include healthy myth
busting. In dominating myths and narratives across the America—and globally— ‘the Americas’,
‘Americans’, and ‘the West’ problematically position Indigenous Peoples as ‘vanished’ and
‘disappeared’ outside of a Euro-linear narrative of ‘progress’, ‘freedom’, ‘land wars’ and
‘democracy.’ ‘Cowboys/Vaqueros’, ‘Indians/Indios’, ‘lawmen/jefes’, ‘bandits/banditos’,
‘prostitutes/prostitutas’ are characters (caricatures) which certainly populated the Euro-American
imaginary and construction of Euro-American metageographies of ‘the West’, the ‘Nor’ west’, the
‘Southwest’ and ‘old Mexico.’ Consequently, this imaginary has had (and continues to have)
negative impacts and consequences—and, not only affecting Indigenous Peoples. Its authority
and control has been central to shaping the assimilation process of numerous waves of
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immigrants to Canada, Mexico and the U.S. Globalized myth and fiction about the ‘Indian/indio’
‘Savage/barbaro’—circulated vis-à-vis products, ideas, behaviors—and ,--transported and
absorbed as national narratives of citizenship—have deeply chiseled numerous individuals and
groups’ social, economic and political relations with Indigenous peoples in Mexico, Canada and
the U.S. We want to look closely at these constructions and productions of class, racialized
bodies, reproduction and political economy—at the country level, at the ‘nation-within-nation’
level, and at national border regime level— which are so often overlooked and/or disavowed in
normative approaches to “Native Studies.”
1. WEEKLY SYNOPSIS:
Critical Readings & Responses 15%
For each assigned reading (and occasional films), you are required
to provide a 1/3 page, typed, synopsis. See course site for details.
4. MID-TERM:
Book/Film/Media/Website Review (800-1000 words) 25%
See course site for instructions.
REQUIRED TEXTS
(I strongly encourage you to purchase these at a discount, when possible,
at the many vendors available online.)
• (ADE) Forbes, Jack D. The American Discovery of Europe. University of Illinois Press. 2007. ISBN-
13: 978-0252031526
• (IMM) Fox, Jonathan and Gaspar Rivera-Salgado, Eds. Indigenous Mexican Migrants in the United
States. Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, UCSD and the Center for Comparative Immigrations
Studies at the University of California, San Diego. 2004. ISBN-13: 978-1878367501
• (TSP) Jacobs, Sue-Ellen, et al. Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and
Spirituality. University of Illinois Press. 1997. ISBN-13: 978-0252066450
• (WC) Mattingly and Hansen. Women and Change at the U.S.-Mexico Border. University of
Arizona Press, 2008. ISBN-13: 978-0816527465.
• (USS) Stasiulis and Yuval-Davis. Unsettling Settler Society. Sage Press, 1995. ISBN-13: 978-
0803986947.
• (FNFT) Timpson, Annis May. First Nations, First Thoughts: The Impact of Indigenous Thought in
Canada. University of Washington Press. 2010. ISBN-13: 978-0774815529
• (MTT) Van Kirk, Sylvia. Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur Trade Society, 1670-1870., Watson &
Dwyer, 1996. ISBN-13: 978-1896239514.
• (RT) Wilson, Waziyatawin Angela. Remember This!: Dakota Decolonization and the Eli Taylor
Narratives (Contemporary Indigenous Issues). University of Nebraska Press. 2005. ISBN-13: 978-
0803298446 NOTE!!: This is an E-Book, and is available for free online, and you can also
download it free to your desktop through UBCO library catalog.
• (P) Pamphlets, or (HO) Hand-Outs, or (L) Links provided on course web site (such as the
U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and important abstract samples,
book reviews, literature reviews, films, etc.). I will provide copies to you and/or send you
these as pdf links on a course Internet site.
• (CP) Course Packet: supplemental readings which support discussions and fill in gaps.
• (PD) Primary Documents and archive links, (Yale University ‘Avalon Project’; numerous
Indigenous Peoples’ –run and designed Internet source sites, for example…), that I will provide you.
NOTICE!! Several are on order and will not be available right away. Don’t panic. If you want to
purchase them on a discount Internet site, do that. I will provide you with hand-outs (HO), a supplemental
course packet, and Books On Reserve to help alleviate the cost to you.
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COURSE POLICIES
Know your Rights and Responsibilities!
DISABILITY SERVICES
If you require disability-related accommodations to meet the course objectives, please contact the
Coordinator of Disability Resources located in the Student Development and Advising area of the student
services building. For more information about Disability Resources or academic accommodations, please
visit the website at: http://web.ubc.ca/okanagan/students/disres/welcome.html
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If a hardship occurs (physical, mental, structural) you should make contact me through email and by
phone (and all your professors and appropriate UBC administrators) at the earliest possible time. Inform
me about the hardship, and the arrangements that you are needing if you are going to miss a class or
classes, and if you are going to miss a mid-term or final exam. All students who miss or plan to miss a
regularly scheduled final examination should contact the office of the Associate Dean, Curriculum and
Students. Please familiarize yourself with UBCO grading practices at
http://okanagan.students.ubc.ca/calendar/index.cfm?tree=3,41,90,1014.
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at any time. Changes will be announced in class at the earliest possible
opportunity—through email and in class. Thanks!
WEEK 1:
CRITICAL
FRAMEWORK
S
Thursday— Course introduction & syllabus TAMEZ: lecture
09/09 review; Prepared hand outs (HO)
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Two Spirit/GLBTQ Internet ‘QQM’. Prepare a critically about the
Resources’, and engage these statement readings and texts as
descriptive narratives, activisms, reflecting what ‘QQM’. Here’s how:
declarations, and historicization of you embrace and You must bring at least
decolonial gender sexuality why, what you can one typed QUESTION
identity and expression: (SAVE TO build-upon, reject, to contribute to a
YOUR FAVORITES!) hold up to further basket, from which we
http://people.ucalgary.ca/~ptrembl interrogation, what will draw. You must
a/aboriginal/two-spirited-american- pieces/aspects bring at least one
indian-resources.htm require further typed QUOTE drawn
work…or, don’t go from the readings
(ADE) 1-3 far enough, etc. which provides a
framework or lens for
something you wish to
vocalize, and teases
out a perspective you
feel demands
attention. You will
engage mindfully in
how these viewpoints
are productive as
METHODS upon which
you are/can be building
your research.
WEEK 6
Tuesday, (TSP) Finish; Visit Anne Serene’s Round-Robin, Synopsis due.
10/12 gender web-site “Trans-gender Everyone
theories” at contributes
http://www.humboldt.edu/~mpw1/ formally. Ditto
gender_theory/; see also above.
“Perspectives Used to Look at
Gender,” at
http://www.humboldt.edu/~mpw1/
gender_theory/perspectives4.shtml
, and
“Gender & Power‘, at
http://www.google.com/search?
hl=en&rlz=1W1RNWN_en&q=gend
er+and+power&aq=f&aql=&aqi=g
-p1g9&oq= , (ADE) 5-7;
Thursday, (RT) 4-5; (USS) Chs. 2, 3, 7, Round-Robin,
10/14 ditto.
WEEK 7
Tuesday, (USS) Chs. 8, 11; (CP) Sylvia Round-Robin. Synopsis due.
10/19 Escarcega,
Thursday, (RT) Finish; (FNFT) Part 1, 2 Ditto.
10/21
WEEK 8 MID-TERMS THIS
WEEK!
Tuesday, Independent Research MID-TERMS No Synopsis this
10/26 PRESENTED week!
Thursday, Independent Research MID-TERMS FILM VIEWING:
10/ 28 PRESENTED DETAILS TBA
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WEEK 9
Tuesday, (WC) 1, 2, 3, 4 Round-robin. Synopsis due.
11/02
Thursday, (WC) 5, 6, 7 Ditto.
11/04
WEEK 10
Tuesday, (FNFT) 3 ; (WC) 8, 9, 10 Round-robin. Synopsis due.
11/09
Thursday, (FNFT) Part 4: 7-9; Independent
11/11 Remembrance Day, No Class study.
WEEK 11 DRAFT ABSTRACTS
DUE!
Tuesday, (FNFT) Part 5: 10, 11; (CP) Smith Round-robin. Synopsis due. 1ST
11/16 and Kauanui, “Native Feminisms DRAFT ABSTRACT DUE.
Engage American Studies”; Renya
Ramirez, “Race, Tribal Nation, and
Gender: A Native Feminist
Approach to Belonging”; UNPFII
‘history’ at
http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpf
ii/en/history.html
Thursday, ON TRAVEL! NO CLASS.
11/18 Independent research day.
WEEK 12
Tuesday, (CP) The Working Group on Human Round-robin. Synopsis due. 2nd
11/23 Rights and the Border Wall, DRAFT ABSTRACT DUE!
“Violations on the Part of the
United States Government of
Indigenous Rights Held…”; Visit
Website: U.T. Law Working Group,
Texas-Mexico Border Wall, at ;
(IMM) 1, Part I: 2, 3
Thursday, (IMM) Part II, 4, 6, 7; (CP) Sylvanna Ditto.
11/25 Falcon, “National Security” and the
Violation of Women: Militarized
Border Rape at the U.S.-Mexico
Border,” (CP) Margo Tamez,
“Restoring Lipan Apache Women’s
Laws, Lands and Strength in El
Calaboz Rancheria at the Texas-
Mexico Border”
WEEK 13
Tuesday, (CP) Aída Hernández Castillo, Round-robin. Synopsis due. BRING
11/30 “Between Feminist Ethnocentricity POLISHED
and Ethnic Essentialism,”; (IMM) ABSTRACT TO
Part III; (FNFT) Part 2: 4 EXCHANGE. PEER
REVIEWS.
Thursday, LAST OFFICIAL DAY OF CLASS. Ditto. ABSTRACT PEER
12/02 (IMM) Part IV 12, 14, 15., Part V. REVIEWS DUE (2
17, 19 ,20 COPIES). FILM
VIEWING: DETAILS
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TBA
WEEK 14 INDEPENDENT RESEARCH SIGN UP SHEET
PASSED AROUND
FOR FINAL EXAM
PRESENTATIONS
Tuesday, OFFICE CONSULTATIONS BY APPT.
12/07
Thursday, OFFICE CONSULTATIONS BY APPT.
12/09
WEEK 15
Tuesday, Final Exam Presentations,
12/14 Begin
Thursday, Final Exam Presentations,
12/16 Conclude
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