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Topics in Indigenous Literatures I

Topics in Indigenous Literatures I (Fall 2025)

ENGL 481
Undergraduate
Fall 2025
3 Units
In-person
6
  • ENGL 200
  • ENGL 290

N/A

one-way Exclusions
  • Simon Ortiz's from Sand Creek
  • Marilyn Dumont's The Pemmican Eaters
  • Armand Ruffo’s The Thunderbird Poems
  • Layli Longsoldier's ’38'
  • César Vallejo’s Spain Take This Cup from Me

And others. Excerpts from most texts will be supplied by the instructor except for a few book-length works of poetry that will be available at the campus bookstore. 

**Subject to change**

ENGL 481: Indigenous Poems of/as History

In this course we will read a range of works by Indigenous poets that address history in myriad senses: from works focused on specific historical events; to personal histories of individual figures; to histories of colonialism and resistance as broader processes structuring our present; to works that interrogate history itself as a concept through the interaction of historical narrative and collective memory. We will also read these works as themselves emerging from historical contexts which they mediate in their form and style as well as content. A range of older and contemporary works will be read ranging from single poems to book length projects with accompanying theoretical and critical texts. Throughout we will be concerned with understanding poetry as a practice that bears and transforms history, asking what reading practices are adequate to engage such works in their own context while carrying them forward into our own. To do so will be to understand ongoing Indigenous histories in the Americas as sites of revolutionary potential within global modernity. 

Assessments

Grading Components

  • Short and long written assignments
  • Presentations
  • Class participation

**Subject to change **

  • Cross listed with INDG 495.
  • This course is repeatable for credit under different topic titles.

³ÉÈË´óƬ Repeatable Courses
With repeatable courses, the course number (e.g., ENGL 466) is repeatable, but the topic is not. You can take as many topics as you like under the same course number, but you can only take each individual topic once. 

Questions? Please email our Undergraduate Assistant