Why Do Native People Matter?: History and the Politics of Making It

HIST 116 Subject & Catalog Number

Historians of North America have traditionally discounted the histories of Indigenous peoples who have called its many environs home since time immemorial. This is certainly the case for scholars of United States history. As Western Shoshone scholar Ned Blackhawk has written, “Indigenous absence has long been a tradition of American historical analysis... exiled from the American origin story, Indigenous peoples await the telling of a history that includes them.” With Blackhawk’s words in mind, this course asks an essential question: why do Native people matter to US history? In pursuing an answer to this question, this seminar will focus on aspects of Indigenous sovereignty, race, gender, and environments in the process of U.S. expansion and grapple with the ways in which these struggles over land and sovereignty shaped the United States through the production of its history. Students will engage with the histories of various periods in “Native American history” and historians’ (academic and lay) assessments of them to understand the practice of writing history as itself being a political process, integral to the very phenomenon examined in class. Over the semester, students will utilize museum collections in the Harvard Peabody Museum and Harvard Archives, and explore a range of methods in the discipline of history to grapple with and ultimately re-narrate the Native history of Harvard University.