Mika Kennedy and Pamela Sertzen
Coordinators

The Native American and Indigenous Studies Minor is grounded in a deep respect for Indigenous knowledge systems and traditions as well as a recognition of the connections Native peoples have to ancestral lands and ways of life. Situated on the homelands of the Gayogo̱hó:nǫˀ people and Haudenosaunee Confederacy—lands expropriated in the 18th century to build the “Empire State”—our programming follows an approach to learning that centers Native voices. Indigenous Studies is inherently interdisciplinary and the minor is committed to critical and creative pedagogies, scholarly rigor, and social justice. The NAIS minor trains students to think politically and build skills to analyze the legacies of colonization, slavery, and empire as well as their lasting impacts on Native peoples and settlers. With particular focus on Indigenous movements for life, land, and sovereignty across Turtle Island and Oceania, courses in NAIS span a broad range of issues impacting Indigenous communities through interdisciplinary, comparative, and relational methods of inquiry. Students are encouraged to analyze the ways in which race, gender, sexuality, and class intersect with indigeneity and settler colonization in order to draw relevance between our curriculum and their own lives.

Student Learning Outcomes:

  1. Identify key concepts, debates, histories, and methodologies within the field of Native American & Indigenous Studies. 
  2. Examine historic and contemporary forms of Indigenous sovereignty both locally and globally, and how they challenge settler colonialism and other systemic forms of oppression.
  3. Recognize the ways that Indigenous cosmologies and worldviews shape understandings of key topics such as land, kinship, language, gender and gender expression, sexuality, religion, and nationhood. 
  4. Analyze how Indigenous peoples have organized to resist, survive, and thrive through both community action and scholarly inquiry.
  5. Demonstrate knowledge of the relationships between Indigenous and racial/ethnic movements for liberation.