21L.435 Literature and Film

Same Subject As: CMS.840
Prereq: One subject in Literature or Comparative Media Studies
Units: 3-3-6 HASS-H; Can be repeated for credit

This course examines diverse Indigenous films, television shows, and novels from Turtle Island (Canada & the United States). Students will study a wide variety of influential and popular Indigenous works of art, including activist-based documentaries, adventure comedies, memoirs, dystopian novels, sitcoms, and animations. These works challenge accepted historical and contemporary fictions that sustain settler-colonial forms of domination, offering poignant correctives to the misrepresentations of Indigenous peoples that have dominated popular culture in the region. We will also consider the larger historical, legal, and political contexts to which these works respond. Film and literary texts will include: Reservation Dogs by Sterlin Harjo (Seminole/Muscogee Creek), The Mountain of SGaana by Christopher Auchter  (Haida), Smoke Signals by Chris Eyre (Cheyenne and Arapaho), The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline (Métis) and Out of the Depths by Isabelle Knockwood (Mi’kmaw).