Tribal Narratives
Prof. James Treat
Wednesdays 12:00-2:30 p.m.
AIS 490 Section A
Course credit available for undergraduates (3 hours, CRN 45685)
or graduate students (4 hours, CRN 45686).

This seminar offers an interdisciplinary survey of what might be called tribalist autoinscriptions:  literary nonfiction by contemporary native writers documenting their own communities.

Assigned readings feature representative texts that transcend conventional genre distinctions such as ethnography, historiography, and biography.  Selected critical essays by scholars from a variety of humanistic and social scientific disciplines introduce useful theoretical perspectives and analytical tools.  Class discussions are supplemented by audiovisual materials, including documentary films by native filmmakers portraying their own communities.

Key themes include:  problems of representation and narrative strategy; intersections of chronology, community, and character; boundaries of genre; dialectics of time and space, history and myth, culture and personality; transformations of orality and literacy.

Tentative reading list:
N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969)
Leslie Marmon Silko, Storyteller (1981)
Gerald Vizenor, The People Named The Chippewa: Narrative Histories (1984)
Ray Young Bear, Black Eagle Child: The Facepaint Narratives (1992)
Greg Sarris, Mabel McKay: Weaving the Dream (1994)
Louise Erdrich, Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country (2003)

For more information, please contact Prof. Treat by e-mail at treaty@uiuc.edu or through his website at http://www.uiuc.edu/~treaty.