Iokepa Casumbal-Salazar
Assistant Professor and Coordinator
The Native American/Indigenous Studies minor covers a broad range of issues, from the historically constructed and contested nature of individual identities to issues of cultural and historical representation, social justice, and struggles for racial redress. While the primary focus of the minor is on the experiences of Indigenous peoples, its overall objective is to encourage, allow, and facilitate a study of the self in relation to the other. Where possible, courses rely on historical and comparative methodologies, a combination of epistemological/theoretical concerns with an analysis of “real-life” problems, and a critical approach to the processes of knowledge construction, all of which allow students to develop a contextual understanding of the issues they are studying.
The minor requires 21 credit hours of work. Students are required to take two courses from the Conceptual Frameworks, a 3-credit capstone course, and one course each from the following categories:
- Power and Liberation
- Comparative and International
- Policy and Praxis
- Culture and History