Taught by CIC faculty and meeting over the course of a week in the spring semester, CIC-AISC seminars featured readings in common, classroom discussions, and intensive exposure to archival research methods and scholarship in American Indian Studies. The Graduate Student Spring Seminars were a unique educational experience in which 13 students, one from each CIC institution, took a class together.
19th Century Indian Removal in the Old Northwest Territory
Instructor: Dawn Marsh
June 10 – 17
The theme and scope of this seminar is the exploration of Indian removal in the Old Northwest Territory. Recent publications, Bowes, Warren, Sleeper-Smith, Murphy, and others draw attention to the geographic region bounded by the Appalachia Mountains to the east, the Ohio River to the south, the Great Lakes to the north, and the Mississippi River to the west and the temporal landscape of the late eighteenth through the early nineteenth centuries.
This seminar will focus on the archival holdings of three repositories: the Indiana State Library and Historical Bureau, the Indiana Historical Society, and the Tippecanoe County Historical Society. During the week students will also visit several sites of historical interpretation in the region: Prophetstown State Park, Tippecanoe Battlefield and Interpretive Center, and, as time allows, points on the Potawatomi Trail of Death.
Two universities are proposed as host sites for the seminar participants: IUPUI in Indianapolis and Purdue University in West Lafayette. IUPUI is centrally located and within walking distance to the proposed collections. Access to the Tippecanoe County Historical Society and the historic sites will require transportation that can be provided by Purdue University.
American Indian Rhetorics
Instructor: Malea D. Powell
June 17 – 24
Rhetoric scholars study the discursive nature of any act. They tend to see all forms of meaning-making—textual, material, social, historical, and so forth—as their province. Some in the discipline study writing specifically. Others study oratory, music, digital spaces, art, museums, and other disciplinary discourses such as history.
This seminar will take a broad historical approach and will challenge students to make connections between ancient rhetorical practices (like petroglyphs), pre-contact rhetorical practices (like wampum and/or wintercounts), and post-contact practices (like beadwork, creative and academic writing, music, and multimedia composition). Students will be asked to think broadly about a continuum of rhetorical productions. Some of these include: material culture, non-alphabetic forms, oral & aural forms, and alphabetic forms. Students will explore how those productions work to “make” (or not make) American Indian cultures and communities (tribal and pantribal) and how those productions function inside the interdisciplinary area of American Indian Studies.
The seminar will take place at Michigan State University and will utilize local and regional archives, museums, libraries, galleries, cultural centers, and American Indian Studies faculty, as well as local Native artists, musicians, writers, and events.
