Zero Brown U. freshmen interested in ‘Critical Native American and Indigenous Studies’ degree

Brown University’s program in “Critical Native American and Indigenous Studies” does not currently have any freshmen enrolled in the concentration, which is the equivalent of a major.

This program, along with degrees in astronomy and “Contemplative Studies,” are the “smallest concentrations,” according to The Brown Daily Herald.

“Critical Native American and Indigenous studies focuses on centering Indigenous perspectives and histories in a landscape that has often ignored or overlooked the,” the newspaper reports. Five students graduated with the concentration in the most recent school year, according to the student newspaper.

Students have several options for courses in the concentration this year. They include “Native American Boarding School Histories” and “Climate Change, Human Rights, and the Policy Process.”

Interested students can also take a course called “Queer Indigenous Studies and Two-Spirit Critique.”

“The structures of settler colonialism are designed to wholly dispossess, erase, and eliminate the fullness of Indigenous life,” the description states. “As such settler colonialism is heavily invested in both heteropatriarchy and heteronormativity as regulatory schemes oriented toward extraction and conquest.”

This class, a senior seminar, “will explore the unruly ‘queerness’ of Indigeneity.”

Students can also learn about comic books, which the program calls “very white-American.”

“This course would begin with decolonial theory, history of indigenous storytelling, then move into the history of comics and highlight indigenous stereotypes, and then move into how indigenous people have used this very white-American form of storytelling and reclaimed indigenous portrayals,” the description for “Combating Colonialism: Comics and Indigenous Storytelling” states.

The concentration launched in 2023, the Brown Daily Herald reported.

“Native American and Indigenous Studies has been something students and faculty have expressed interest in and worked to develop for a number of years,” Rae Gould,executive director of the University’s Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative, told the student newspaper in 2023. “Being able to offer an official concentration, and not only courses with NAIS focus or content, has elevated the work of many past students and faculty who have waited to see this development.”

The program also hosts events, including a “monthly beading circle.”

In late October, it will host a talk on the “public whiteness” of the Smithsonian Institute.

The description states:

This talk probes the architectural, aesthetic, and scientific project of the Smithsonian Institute’s formation, one rooted in a developmental narrative of progress and entrenching racial hierarchies meant to temper a fractious mid-nineteenth century polity inching toward disunion, It considers how the institution’s monumental architecture was informed by ethnographic ideas of race, culture, and soil, in particular Anglo Saxon origins of Gothic and Romanesque styles.

Columbia University Professor Mabel Wilson will deliver the talk.

Wilson, an architecture and American Studies scholar, “makes visible and legible the ways that anti-black racism shapes the built environment along with the ways that blackness creates spaces of imagination, refusal and desire,” according to her faculty bio.

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