LATINAM 325

First Nations in Latin America


Please note: this is archived course information from 2017 for LATINAM 325.

Description

Indigenous peoples have played a huge role in major transformations throughout Latin America, leading movements that have introduced twenty-first century constitutions in Venezuela (1999), Ecuador (2007) and Bolivia (2008), incorporating indigenous concepts of sumak kawsay and suma qamaña (living well, wellbeing) and new rights, such the right of Mother Nature to regenerate. Theorists describe these innovative changes as potentially post-capitalist or decolonial, but they are also a return to ways of knowing that indigenous communities have practiced for millennia.

This course will introduce students to the long history of indigenous peoples before the arrival of Europeans to the lands they call the Americas and indigenous organisations call Abya Yala. This study will begin by analysing how modernity itself was created through colonialism and cannot be separated from this historical process. To understand proposals coming from indigenous communities today across Abya Yala requires understanding of how modernity created knowledge structures that sustain colonial relations.

This study of colonialism will focus on indigenous writings about their own history alongside canonical writings by specialists who describe how European colonisation created civilisations in lands they called the Americas.

Learning Goals

The aim of this course is to develop the skills required for understanding indigenous knowledge today by studying the history of Latin America from several different indigenous perspectives in dialogue with well-known scholarship. By the end of the course, students should be equipped with the basic history for understanding how First Nations of Latin America understand their own history and that of the region of Latin America and the world.

Availability 2017

Not taught in 2017

Lecturer(s)

Coordinator(s) Dr Kathryn Lehman
Lecturer(s) Dr Genaro Oliveira

Reading/Texts

Attendance at lectures is required and students should come prepared to discuss the assigned readings each week. There will be two to three articles or book chapters to be read in connection with viewing audiovisual material. Drawing on the various approaches covered, students will be expected to develop a research-informed essay on the topics introduced.

Assessment

Coursework only

Points

LATINAM 325: 15 points

Prerequisites

15 points from LATINAM 201, 216, SPANISH 201, 202
 

Restrictions

SPANISH 306, 725, 729