Race, Mem, Indigen Surv

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

How are the histories of Indigenous survival and resistance in the Chesapeake Bay remembered—and how are they systematically erased? Engaging the fields of Indigenous Studies, Black Studies, History, and more, this advanced seminar examines how Indigenous communities throughout the Mid-Atlantic have navigated, resisted, and adapted to the intertwined legacies of settler colonialism, slavery, and racialization across the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. Through the interdisciplinary analysis of historical texts, law, popular culture, and public memory, students will interrogate regional and national narratives of Indigenous extinction—examining the central roles of racial formation and anti-Blackness in the settler colonial project of Indigenous erasure. Most importantly, this course centers stories of Indigenous survivance, a term coined by Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor to celebrate the creative, embodied, and collective strategies through which Indigenous communities have continuously asserted their presence upon their homelands—refusing to disappear.