The now global movement known as the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) campaign has long sought to draw our collective attention to the steady and sinister crisis of the increasing number of unsolved cases to date. Perhaps shocking to some is the fact that, according to one report, Washington State sits as the second highest state with some 71 cases while Seattle sits as the highest city in the nation with some 45 cases. But how could this be in one of the most ostensibly inclusive and/or aware states and cities in the U.S.? The reason may seem—for many but not for all—to be somewhat obscured.
But many indigenous women, queer, and/or two-spirit artists, writers, and filmmakers all across “the Americas” have long produced art that has taken recourse to using certain symbols and metaphors—such as the more contemporary red dress as well as the red hand painted over one’s mouth—in order to illuminate deep, dark, and disturbing truths. These folks, like many before them, use their work as a form of “illumination” that not only brings light to something otherwise obscure but also brings one into a state of greater awareness and consciousness with the more spiritual light of revelation. Like the many candlelight vigils held for the mourning and remembrance of the missing and the murdered, the disappeared and the dead, these indigenous illuminations reveal the historical, systemic, and interlocking violences of racial capitalism and (settler) (neo)colonialism, racism and sexism, queerphobia and (neo)imperialism.
This course investigates a series of indigenous forms of cultural production—primarily literature—from a variety of spatio-temporal coordinates in the ongoing practices of resistance, resurgence, and revitalization. Like many indigenous writers and filmmakers, we will cross linguistic boundaries by engaging with material from the anglophone, francophone, and hispanophone regions. Together we will read, watch, and analyze a set of authors and their “cases” whose illuminations are also interventions into our collective thoughts and thinking.
In this course, students will cultivate their critical, interdisciplinary, and multilingual thinking, reading, writing, and research skills. Classes will be a mixture of some lecture in the beginning of the quarter but mainly followed by small- and large-group in-class activities and discussions thereafter. Assignments include weekly readings/viewings, discussion posts, a series of metacognitive and reflective journals, as well as a collaborative podcast series.