AUTUMN 2019
CHID 250: Indigenous Re-Visions of Cultural Production (Lydia Heberling)
This course introduces students to Indigenous-centered theories of literary studies and to a small
sampling of innovative literary works by Indigenous writers from across the Americas and Oceania.
The course provides a critical overview of the field of contemporary Indigenous literary studies, with
an emphasis on the ways Indigenous texts teach attentive readers how to enter into these dynamic
stories of people on the move. The course also interrogates the limits of settler geographies and
temporalities as narrative frames, as well as literary genre distinctions, and considers the ways in which the “literary” nature of storytelling extends into oral, visual, and performative mediums. By
encountering texts that center themes of migration, dislocations, and relocations, such as Chumash
and Esselen writer Deborah Miranda’s 2013 mixed-media, mixed-genre book, Bad Indians: A Tribal
Memoir and Chamorro poet Craig Santos Perez’s 2017 film-poem, Praise Song for Oceania , students
will build a theoretical toolkit for engaging Indigenous creative forms of cultural production.
CHID 480: Contemporary Violence in Latin America: Neoliberalism, Dispossession, Migration, and Indigenous Peoples (Sebastián López Vergara)
The wave of conservative military dictatorships and authoritarian governments between 1960-1990 in
Latin America radically reshaped the function of the state, the character of economies and the
composition of societies in the region. Accounts of these processes underscore the extreme structural
violence employed in this transition to neoliberalism. This class focuses on this juncture in relation to
the long history of struggle of Indigenous peoples in Latin America in order to contend with
dominant rubrics of nation and class. Students will learn about the contemporary predatory effects of
neoliberal violence against Indigenous peoples in Bolivia, Chile, Guatemala, Mexico and Peru as
entrenchments of colonial violence and social marginalization. Emphasis will be placed on
racialization, different forms of state violence, environmental destruction through extraction, and
migration. We also will always heed the many alternative political projects and social movements that
propose “post-neoliberal” societies. Students will engage with documentaries, cultural texts, and
theoretical writings.
WINTER 2020
CHID 250: Anticolonial Theories and Practices in the Americas (Sebastián López Vergara)
This course introduces students to theories of anticolonialism through the works of Indigenous, Black,
Asian, and mestizo thinkers across the Americas and Pacific. It approaches traditions of anticolonial
thought, from 16th century to the contemporary political moment, as diverse political and intellectual
projects that emphasize the related character of oppressions under colonialism, capitalism, and
modernity in the Americas. Offering a long historical perspective, this course takes Quechua
chronicler Felipe Waman Poma’s work (c. 1615) and his concept of “good government” to examine
differential processes of violence, dispossession, enslavement, and subjection as well as to underscore
traditions of struggle and liberation. Students will engage through a hemispheric and trans-Oceanic
approach with the works of Frantz Fanon, Fausto Reinaga, Angela Davis, Leslie Marmon Silko, Irma Otzoy, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, among others, in order to establish relations between seemingly
unrelated oppressions while studying their particularities.
CHID 480: Spanish and US Imperialism in California and the Pacific (Lydia Heberling)
This course examines the intersection of the Spanish and US imperial projects, whose expansionist
trajectories intersected in California with devastating effects on its Indigenous populations, before
continuing on into the Pacific. A collapsing Spanish empire seized lands and established missions
across the Pacific Coast in 1769. Less than a century later, the United States claimed California for
itself, fulfilling its vision of Manifest Destiny and extended its policy of (violently) displacing
Indigenous communities. Within a single lifetime, Indigenous peoples in California became the target,
and collateral, of two imperial projects whose tactics of colonial domination and subjugation had been
refined over the span of centuries and the expanse of continents. With a specific focus on Indigenous
texts from California and the Pacific, we will develop a critical understanding of these imperial
histories and the resulting migrations and diasporas, as well as the subversive and resistant
future-oriented imaginations of the Indigenous populations most affected by these colonialisms.
SPRING 2020
CHID 250: Methods to Decolonize Inquiry: Indigenous Studies Theory Workshop (Lydia Heberling & Sebastián López Vergara)
This co-taught course asks students to engage with Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s intervention to decolonize
knowledge and research methods. The class will expose students to approaches to knowledge
production in Indigenous Studies that emphasize relations with land, peoples, human and
other-than-human beings, as well as among different modes and sites of inquiry and action. Designed
as a “theory workshop”, students will constantly be writing and working on group assignments and
engaging with scholarly and activist works. These approaches will allow students to carefully consider
how knowledge production is related to social processes outside of the university. Students will revise
the UW Library Archives; engage with the Burke Museum collection; collaborate with local
Indigenous organizations; and volunteer with the UW Human Rights Center on issues related to
immigration rights in Washington State.