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Writing about Indigeneity for a General Public

December 6, 2021

To help build a deeper and more nuanced understanding of Indigeneity among the general public, students will pick Indigenous related themes – boarding schools, dam removal, pipelines, immigration, salmon recovery, public memorial/monuments, wetlands restoration, etc. – and write public-facing texts which attempt to incorporate, if not center, the insights from Indigenous Studies. Depending on the selected project, students will immerse themselves to varying degrees in the academic literature on Indigenous (especially Coast Salish peoples’) history, law and culture. Consideration of rhetorical form (i.e, genre, textual referents, tone, rhythm, voices, language, sources, and so on) will be a central concern as well. Finally, students will be asked to be astute scholars of non-Indigenous cultures, in particular whiteness.

A Calderwood Seminar in Public Writing with Jonathan Warren