RELS208 - NATIVE AMERICAN REL/LIT

"Native American Religion and Literature" will focus on learning about the culture and religion of the Iroquois Confederacy and the Ojibwe. Students will be working directly with several on-going projects being done in collaboration with Native American communities. The first project is creating a database of traditional names from the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois Confederacy that will be provided to a Mohawk scholar so that the databases can be used by the six nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. Traditional names were lost to the six nations of the Confederacy for decades and their return signals a new era of cooperation between students, scholars, archives, and indigenous communities. The second project involves creating a digital archive of Ojibwe music, photographs, oral histories, museum artifacts, ethnography, and video tapes of elders. Assignments will include reading historical, anthropological, literary and religious studies works. Students will also be provided access tonever before published works of oral history recordings and video tapes in order to better understand the Native American oral tradition. These projects will directly benefit 13 indigenous communities. Evaluation will be based on the work done on the project, a 5-7 page midterm paper, and a 10 page final research paper.