New Minor in Native American and Indigenous Studies

The Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism and Diaspora (RCD) will host a new minor in Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS), starting in fall 2019. This minor is the result of three years of student organizing and extensive student-faculty collaboration.

NAIS is a vital component of the RCD’s larger curriculum and mission due to the unique histories, struggles, politics, cultures, and legal statuses of Native peoples. NAIS programs—of which there are over 112 in the United States—are a crucial foundational approach for the critical study of the Americas and American history and culture. This program will provide an institutional anchor for studies of tribal sovereignty, cultural resistance, and Indigenous community. The RCD puts NAIS in the context of a global critical indigenous studies, which helps students to reflect on the politics of knowledge, conceptions of political community, and visions of liberation in transformative ways. The NAIS program will be shaped by the RCD's unusual capacity to engage critical intersections within Native and Indigenous Studies, for example by engaging historical and contemporary relationships between Native, African-descended, and Black Indian communities, within and beyond the Northeast. Through the minor, students will have the chance to examine and deepen the relationship between the classroom and tribal communities, including but not limited to the Massachusett, Wampanoag, Nipmuc, Narragansett, Pequot, Lenape, and Abenaki communities in both urban and tribal-national contexts.  

A list of fall 2019 classes that count for the minor will be available on the RCD website soon. Students will also be able to count courses related to NAIS that they have taken previously toward the minor. Please contact Amahl Bishara for more details.