Without a doubt, the untimely deaths of Native American leaders Marsha Gomez (Choctaw/Chicana) and Ingrid Washinawatok (Menominee), in the late 1990s, accentuates the complexity, globality, and intersectional nature of their labor, activism, and vision that predates and foreshadows current concerns of multifaceted decoloniality and self-determination. Gomez, a sculptor and peace activist, was a founder of Indigenous Women’s Network (IWN) in 1983 and an instrumental organizer of a 1997 multiday gathering of indigenous women, who were community leaders, activists, healers, educators, writers, thinkers, on the grounds of Alma de Mujer. Washinawatok was a human rights activist who served as the chair of the NGO Committee on the United Nations International Decade of the World's Indigenous Peoples. Her work embraced a global indigeneity as an approach to advocate, demand, and highlight the human dignity of Natives peoples across the world and challenged the constrictions of geopolitics. This course investigates the histories of Native American women to reaffirm and reclaim their place and role in the histories of Native Americans, indigenous peoples, women, Chican@/xs, Greater Mexico, and the United States. We will use a historical approach to unravel Western paradigms of women’s history that erase and omit the histories of Native American women because they defy the singular lens of gender. Furthermore, we will contemplate how multiplicitous understandings that center colonization, settler colonialism, genocide, race, and environmentalism are essential to examining Native American women’s history. Overall, this class will illuminate the stories, struggles, and ideas of community-building, sovereignty, self-determination, and liberation as integral to their genders and sexualities as Native American, Indian, First Nations, indigenous, and red and brown women.
Readings(Selections):
Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon, 1994.
Child, Brenda J. Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012.
Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States. Boston: Beacon Press, 2015
_____. Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960-1975. Reprint. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014.
Gonzales, Patrisia. Red Medicine: Traditional Indigenous Rites of Birthing and Healing. University of Arizona Press, 2015.
Gilio-Whitaker, Dina. As Long As Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock. Boston: Beacon Press, 2019.
Katz, Jane B., ed. Messengers of the Wind: Native American Women Tell Their Life Stories. New York: Ballantine Books, 1996.
LaDuke, Winona. The Winona LaDuke Reader: A Collection of Essential Writings. Penticton, B.C.: Theytus Books, 2002.
Miranda, Deborah A. Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir. Berkeley: Heyday, 2013.
Mihesuah, Devon Abbott. Indigenous American Women: Decolonization, Empowerment, Activism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003.
Muñoz, José Esteban, Jinthana Haritaworn, Myra J Hird, Jasbir K Puar, Eileen A Joy, Uri McMillan, Susan Stryker, Kimberly TallBear, Jami Weinstein, and Judith Halberstam. “Theorizing Queer Inhumanisms: The Sense of Brownness.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies21, no. 2 (2015): 209–210.
Perdue, Theda, ed. Sifters: Native American Women's Lives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
TallBear, Kim. “Standing With and Speaking as Faith: A Feminist-Indigenous Approach to Inquiry.” Journal of Research Practice 10, no. 2 (January 1, 2014): 1-7.