This course introduces students the role of place in Indigenous knowledge systems. We focus primarily on North and South America in our exploration of four overarching themes.
- Locating and Orienting draws on works in linguistic anthropology to consider place names and the encoding of spatial orientation in language.
- Representing focuses on how different social groups make spatial representations and what political and social work such representations do.
- Relating sees the land as kin and explores various dimensions of multispecies relationships.
- Removal and Rootedness draws on what we have learned to fully understand the consequences of removing Indigenous people from their lands (and seas) and to appreciate the stakes of place-based protests today.
- Reconciliation (?) interrogates the politics of “traditional knowledge” as a form of reconciliation, weighing its potential for liberation and also erasure.
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