Indigeneity, Diasporas, and Empire
Our course series, “Unsettling Knowledges: Trans-Oceanic and Hemispheric Indigenous
Studies” explores the diverse critical theories, histories, and activisms generated by Indigenous peoples
across periods, geographies, disciplines, and methods. The classes understand indigeneity as an analytic
that counters colonial forms of world making. Contesting disciplinary boundaries, our course series
centers Indigenous pedagogies and ethics that prioritize relations among seemingly distinct areas and
peoples as the result of transit and migrations; reciprocities between humans, non-humans, lands, and
waters; as well as an understanding of the collective, related, and differential experiences of
dispossession, relocation, and resistance of Indigenous, Black, Asian, and mestizo populations.
With Indigenous knowledges grounding our course content and methods of inquiry, we will
interrogate different as well as intersecting projects across the Americas and Pacific that have
historically claimed land and dispossessed Indigenous and other racialized populations. The courses
also examine contemporary imperial formations that continue the historical yet distinct processes of
oppression and deterritorialization of Indigenous and other communities of color through finance,
extraction, crisis, and migration. Foregrounding this long and changing imperial arc, this series draws
attention to diasporic formations such as Indigenous relocations and territorial reduction, African
slave trade and its afterlives, Asian/Pacific displacement, as well as contemporary processes of migration
in the Global South and North.
Through our participation in the 2017 Summer Institute on Global Indigeneity and in the
Expository Writing Program’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Collaboration grant we have learned
that while our specific areas of study are distinct, our intellectual and teaching praxes are similarly
informed by current trends in Indigenous Studies and underscore a shared commitment to a critical
re-envisioning of higher education grounded in Indigenous epistemologies. Co-teaching in CHID will
allow us to explore ways to move beyond our disciplinary trainings and collaborate on innovative
courses that reimagine the role of humanistic and social scientific education.
Proposed Course Offerings:
Fall 2019
205: Indigenous Re-Visions of Cultural Production (Heberling)
487: Contemporary Violence in Latin America: Neoliberalism, Dispossession,
Migration, and Indigenous Peoples (López Vergara)
Winter 2020
270: Anticolonial Theories and Practices in the Americas (López Vergara)
480: Spanish and US Imperialism in California and the Pacific (Heberling)
Spring 2020
250: Methods to Decolonize Inquiry: Indigenous Studies Theory Workshop (Heberling and López Vergara)
Course Descriptions:
CHID 205: Indigenous Re-Visions of Cultural Production (Heberling, Fall)
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: Spanish and US Imperialism in California and the Pacific (Heberling, Winter)
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.
CHID 487: Contemporary Violence in Latin America: Neoliberalism, Dispossession, Migration, and Indigenous Peoples (López Vergara, Fall)
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.
CHID 270: Anticolonial Theories and Practices in the Americas (López Vergara, Winter)
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 250: Methods to Decolonize Inquiry: Indigenous Studies Theory Workshop (Heberling and López Vergara, Spring)
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.
Biographies:
Lydia Heberling (Yaqui and Apache descent) is a doctoral candidate in the English department and is
writing a dissertation about aesthetic and formal innovations in Pacific coast Indigenous arts and
literatures. She participated in the 2017 Summer Institute on Global Indigeneities; led the Indigenous
pedagogies group on the 2018 EWP’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Collaboration grant, which
emphasized collaborative development of writing curriculum grounded in Indigenous pedagogies; and
organized the Simpson Center graduate research cluster for Indigenous Studies for 2018-2019. She has
taught writing courses on American Indian and Pacific Indigenous literature and media.
Sebastián López Vergara is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature, Cinema and Media. His
research is informed by Indigenous Studies, Latin American Studies, and Cultural Studies. He
participated in the 2017 Summer Institute on Global Indigeneities, received the 2017 WISIR Research
Grant, and was part of the 2018 EWP’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Collaboration Grant. He
published with Tony Lucero an essay review on Mapuche scholarship on Latin American Research
Review. He also participates in the Simpson Center graduate research cluster for Indigenous Studies.
He has taught film, media and English composition classes, Spanish language, and regularly volunteers
with University Beyond Bars.
Events:
1. Organize pedagogy workshops for faculty and students that focus on the distinct yet
overlapping pedagogical goals of Indigenous and antiracist teaching praxes.
2. Collaborate with the new Center in American Indian and Indigenous Studies to support their
first-year developmental goals.
3. Host a showcase of student-generated work (held at the Intellectual House) that celebrates
what kind of scholarship results from Indigenous, decolonial, antiracist pedagogies.
Faculty (in alphabetical order):
Chadwick Allen, María Elena García, Tony Lucero, Dian Million, Chandan Reddy, Josh Reid, Ileana
Rodríguez-Silva, Chris Teuton, Adam Warren.