HIST 255
From Sand Creek to Standing Rock: Recent Native American Histories Fall 2022
Division II Difference, Power, and Equity
This is not the current course catalog

This course surveys Native American/Indigenous histories from the era of the U.S. Civil War to the present as well as future, centering community voices, scholarship, and interpretations. Beginning with Sand Creek and the violences experienced by Native communities in 1864, it traces how diverse Native nations navigated the tumultuous times that followed, up to recent protective actions at Standing Rock and Mauna Kea in the 21st century. Topics include treaty-making and diplomacy; creation and contestation of reservation systems; connections with African-American families and communities; residential school experiences of Native youth and families; Indigenous visual and performative artistic traditions and transformations, both in North America and abroad; urban relocation policy and experiences; Red Power activism and Indigenous internationalism; treaty rights activism and federal recognition debates; environmental interventions and food sovereignty movements; and critiques of settler colonialism. The course stresses the resilience of sovereign Indigenous nations into the present, and introduces students to a wide range of methodological approaches from Native American and Indigenous Studies and history. It blends big-picture vantages on these topics with microhistorical accounts of particular individuals, communities, and events, and offers a continental view of historical changes coupled with attention to the specific area of the Native Northeast–Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican homelands–in which Williams College is situated.