HTY 481-0001: Amerindians Northeast: “A History.”
Instructor: Pawling, Micah
Days/Time: MWF 9:00 – 9:50 AM
Location: Stevens Hall 375
Course Number: 43509
Description: This course explores the significance Native American history from a regional perspective, with an emphasis on the diversity of indigenous peoples, homelands, and identity. While the term Northeast encompasses the northern Atlantic seaboard, west to the Ohio River Valley and the Great Lakes region, and north to Hudson Bay, our primary focus extends beyond New England and eastern Canada to better appreciate human movement, dispossession, and the formation of new homelands and villages. From indigenous lifeways before European arrival to the close of the twentieth century, Native peoples of the Northeast have survived over 500 years of European colonization. For survival, Native leaders made decisions about alliance formations, treaty negotiations, and cultural adaptations. Since Native American history is too often relegated to the distant past, this course explores recent challenges that they confronted. The aim of this course is to understand Indigenous history from their own perspectives. Students will be introduced to the method of ethnohistory that can reveal indigenous voices in the past. We will investigate prominent themes of resistance, accommodation, activism, sovereignty, water, and cultural survival. As one ethnohistorian wrote, Native peoples “were positive actors in their own affairs, not passive pawns subdued by forces beyond their control.”