Native American & Indigenous Studies at PennNAIS Minor
In May of 2014, the School of Arts and Sciences Curriculum Committee and Faculty at the University of Pennsylvania approved a new inter-disciplinary Minor in the field of Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS). Minors at Penn are intended to: enable students to develop knowledges and skills that can complement their major; pursue additional fields of in-depth study beyond the major; express themselves in a different discipline; explore an emerging intellectual field; gain experience in applying specific methods and theories; and/or learn about particular ethnicities, cultures, and heritages.
The NAIS Minor requires SIX courses in total: ONE "Core Course" and FIVE "Related Courses," spread across at least TWO departments at Penn. Students interested in pursuing the NAIS Minor can follow the links on this page for more information.
• To download a pdf file with past and present NAIS course descriptions, see: NAIS New Course Descriptions 2023.pdf
• To register for the NAIS Minor, contact NAIS Advisor Prof. Kate Moore: knmoore@sas.upenn.edu
• For information on other Minors available for study at Penn, see: List of Minors
Overview of NAIS Courses
The University of Pennsylvania currently offers a number of courses with Native American and Indigenous content across several different departments. Several courses include dense content focusing almost exclusively on Native American and First Nations peoples in North America. Other courses offer sections focusing on Indigenous peoples and issues in diverse worldwide locales, from diverse disciplinary perspectives.
Some NAIS courses are cross-listed or can be applied towards other requirements of the College. Other NAIS courses offer foundational knowledge that is central to a particular discipline, but can also be very useful across disciplines. Several new NAIS courses are currently in development; please check back for more information.
Note: The NAIS roster of courses is in a period of transition, since some faculty have retired and some courses are temporarily unavailable. In the interim, we encourage interested students to take other related courses, which can be accommodated as substitutions (contact the NAIS Advisor with any questions).
FALL 2024 NAIS Courses:
Freshman Seminar for FALL!
Contemporary Native Identities: Traditions, Resistance, Reslience, Advocacy, and Joy
ANTH 0085
Prof. Tina Fragoso and Mary Ann Baricuatro Tuesday & Thursday 3:30-5:00 PM
This First-Year Seminar will explore contemporary Native American, Alaska Native and Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) identities and experiences through interdisciplinary and multi-media resources. Readings, guest speakers and course lectures will focus on contemporary Native communities as they maintain their cultural traditions and ceremonies, while navigating the ever-changing political landscape that challenges their existence. Native leaders, authors, activists, educators, musicians and comedians such as Vine Deloria, Jr., Tommy Orange, Robert Warrior, Haunani-Kay Trask, Joy Harjo, Leslie Marmon Silko, David Treuer, Joanne Shenandoah, Jim Ruel and the 1491s, among others, will help us learn about Native resistance and advocacy, while also exploring resilience, joy and ways of knowing. Grades will be based on weekly reading, class discussion leadership and participation, in-class assignments, reading summaries and a final paper.
Theme course for NAIS, Confers College Foundation Cultural Diversity in the U.S. AND College Sector IV Humanities and Social Sciences
Other Theme Courses for Fall 2024:
ANTH 1410 Museums, Monuments, and Social Justice
Professor Richard Levanthal. Tuesday and Thursdays 10:15-11:44
Monuments, museums, and heritage are all critical parts of the world that we have created and are shaped by. These institutions and sites often claim to represent our past, who we imagine ourselves to be today, and how we might define our futures. We often rely on museums and monuments to frame history and history’s relationship to our current social and cultural systems. However, in recent years, social, racial, and economic justice movements have pushed us to rethink the function of monuments, museums, and heritage. In particular, these social movements have helped us understand how racism, sexism, and colonialism are responsible for the creation of monuments and museums. This course examines the echoes and continuities of colonial representations in museums and monuments. In addition, we will examine how new ways of commemorating and representing the past can result in a new vision for our future. By visiting a variety of local monuments and sites and by engaging in conversations about accountability and social justice, this course will challenge us to rethink the tangible and intangible ways that we weave the past into the present for the creation of the future.
Also offered as ARTH 0141. Confers AANA Native American and Indigenous Studies Thematic.
Related Courses: Please see Professor Moore for advising about these listings
ANTH 0020 Anthropology, Race, and the Making of the Modern World
Prof. Deborah Thomas 10:15-11:14 Monday and Wednesday. Anthropology as a field is the study of human beings - past, present, and future. It asks questions about what it means to be human, and whether there are universal aspects to human existence. What do we share and how do we differ? What is "natural" and what is "cultural"? What is the relationship between the past and the present? This course is designed to investigate the ways anthropology, as a discipline, emerged in conjunction with European (and later, American) imperialism, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the will to know and categorize difference across the world. We will probe the relationships between anthropology and modern race-making by investigating how anthropologists have studied key institutions and systems that structure human life: family and kinship, inequality and hierarchy, race and ethnicity, ritual and symbolic systems, gender and sexuality, reciprocity and exchange, and globalization and social change. The course fundamentally probes how the material and ideological constellations of any given moment shape the questions we ask and the knowledge we produce about human.
Confers College Foundation in Cross-Cultural Analysis and College Sector Society
HIST 2401 Indians, Pirates, Rebels and Runaways: Unofficial Histories of the Colonial Caribbean
Prof. Yvonne Fabella (Monday 1:45-4:45) This seminar considers the early history of the colonial Caribbean, not from the perspective of colonizing powers but rather from “below.” Beginning with European-indigenous contact in the fifteenth century, and ending with the massive slave revolt that became the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), we will focus on the different ways in which indigenous, African, European and creole men and women experienced European colonization in the Caribbean, as agents, victims and resistors of imperial projects. Each week or so, we will examine a different social group and its treatment by historians, as well as anthropologists, archaeologists, sociologists, and novelists. Along the way, we will pay special attention to the question of sources: how can we recover the perspectives of people who rarely left their own accounts? How can we use documents and material objects—many of which were produced by colonial officials and elites—to access the experiences of the indigenous, the enslaved, and the poor? We will have some help approaching these questions from the knowledgeable staff at the Penn Museum, the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, and the Van Pelt Library.
MUSC 1500 World Musics and Cultures
Section 401 (Monday and Wednesday 1:45-3:14) and 402 Tuesday and Thursday (10:15-11:44)
This course examines how we as consumers in the "Western" world engage with musical difference largely through the products of the global entertainment industry. We examine music cultures in contact in a variety of ways-- particularly as traditions in transformation. Students gain an understanding of traditional music as live, meaningful person-to-person music making, by examining the music in its original site of production, and then considering its transformation once it is removed, and recontextualized in a variety of ways. The purpose of the course is to enable students to become informed and critical consumers of "World Music" by telling a series of stories about particular recordings made with, or using the music of, peoples culturally and geographically distant from the US. Students come to understand that not all music downloads containing music from unfamiliar places are the same, and that particular recordings may be embedded in intriguing and controversial narratives of production and consumption. At the very least, students should emerge from the class with a clear understanding that the production, distribution, and consumption of world music is rarely a neutral process.
Fulfills College Cross Cultural Foundational Requirement, College Foundation Arts and Letters