HIST-LIT 90GR: Indigenous Genders and Sexualities in North America

Interested students should petition to enroll on my.harvard. In your petition, say a few words about your interest in the course (including concentrations you are considering if you are undeclared), any requirement the course may satisfy, and whether you have taken any other History & Literature seminars. If you have any questions about the course, the readings, or what to expect, please feel free to email me at mridgway@fas.harvard.edu

Indigenous Genders and Sexualities in North America

HIST-LIT 90GR, Fall 2024

Morgan Ridgway, PhD  
mridgway@fas.harvard.edu
Class: Monday, 3:00-5:00pm
Office hours: TBD

Image: Kent Monkman, Constellation of Knowledge, 2022

Course Description:

How do gender and sexuality shape Indigenous life? What does it mean for the body to be a site for both colonial violence and imaginative futures? How have constructions, ideas, and aesthetics of gender and sexuality morphed across time and to what consequences for Native people? This course grapples with these questions through an examination of literature and cultural production by Indigenous peoples in North America. Students will be introduced to some of the foundations of settler colonialism and how gender/sexuality are tools for its power. Students will critically engage works by poets such as M. Carmen Lane and Jake Skeets, fiction by Joshua Whitehead and Billy-Ray Belcourt, essays by Alan Pelaez Lopez and Erica Violet Lee, and more. Students will interrogate these works in conjunction with the histories of colonization in the United States, Canada, and Mexico to understand the anxieties, joys, and power that arise when Indigenous people embrace their bodies. In the process, students will become more familiar with gender, sexuality, and settler colonialism as categories of analysis. Ultimately, this course is an opportunity engage ideas of gender and sexuality as processes and witness the vibrancy and urgency of Indigenous literatures and cultural production.

Required Books

These are available through the Harvard Coop and online sellers. Digital copies will be made available on Canvas or through Hollis as is possible. If you encounter any problems (financial or otherwise) accessing course material, please get in touch with me. Access should never be an impediment. 

*Tommy Orange. There, There, Vintage Books, 2018
*Tommy Pico, Nature Poem
Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of my Brief Body
*jaye simpson, it was never going to be okay
*Ma-Nee Chacaby. 2016. A Two-Spirit Journey: The Autobiography of a Lesbian Ojibwa-Cree Elder

*Asterisks indicate this text is available digitally through Hollis 

Assignments and Grading Breakdown

• Participation: 18%
• Observation notes: 12%
• Secondary source essay (5-7 pages): 20%
  
  • Due October 3 at 11:59pm
• Cultural criticism essay: (4-6 pages): 15%
  
  • Due October 31 at 11:59pm
• Seminar Presentation: 5%
• Final Project (Essay or Zine): 30%
  • Project proposal due November 18 at 11:59pm
  • Final project due: TBD

Course Schedule

The current schedule is a blueprint and any changes will be announced in class and via Canvas/email.

Downloadable Syllabus PDF