Indigenous Oral Traditions and Anti-Colo

Through weekly readings, seminar discussions, and independent research, students will be immersed in the discourse, theoretical approaches, methods, and applications of Indigenous oral traditions and oral histories. Students will learn about the nature of oral traditions from multiple Indigenous perspectives; studying them as deeply grounded knowledge systems and world views connected to places and nations. The course will examine how colonialism has acted a great interrupter to the collective memory which is foundational to Indigenous oral traditions and nationhood. Finally, we will consider how contemporary anti-colonial Indigenous narratives are ‘remembering back’ by drawing upon and building from the stories that have (and have not) been passed down through the generations.