As a 2022-23 Samuel H. Kress Teaching with Primary Sources Fellow with the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art, I have been tasked with designing an open-access American studies syllabus that will be published on the Smithsonian website later in 2023. My course is titled “Indigeneity, Archives, and the American Literary Canon,” and it concentrates on the (de)colonization of syllabi, classrooms, archives, museums, and anthologies related to Native American literature, art, media, and culture. The syllabus grounds itself significantly on Native-authored literature, art, and scholarship, but it also includes white-authored materials that students will analyze for bias, inaccuracy, subjectivity vs. objectivity, and flawed epistemologies and ontologies. Included in the reading assignments are: poems, short stories, illustrations, photographs, graphic novels, comic strips, a western film, material art (like burden straps), wampum belts, court records, and digitized oral history interviews, among other media and genres.
The syllabus is packaged together with three assignments that train students to use the freely accessible digital archives of the Archives of American Art and the Smithsonian Collections in general, teaching them not only to navigate these structures but to perform meaningful and effective primary source research that connects to class topics. By bringing various forms of art together with NAIS scholarship and archival materials, undergraduate and graduate students achieve an advanced understanding of the complex concepts related to “Indigeneity, Archives, and the American Literary Canon.”