Department of English

This course will introduce students to the literature of the Navajo and Pueblo Indians in its historical and cultural contexts. We will read a range of texts from the Navajo and Hopi creation stories to Navajo and Pueblo autobiographies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to contemporary fiction and poetry by such Pueblo and Navajo writers as Leslie Marmon Silko, Luci Tapahonso, Simon Ortiz, and Irvin Morris. This literature will be placed in the ethnohistorical context of contact between Europeans and Indians in the Southwest. To establish this context we will read in whole or in part Pedro de Casteneda's narrative of Coronado's expedition; Edward H. Spicer's *Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1533-1960*; Franklin Folsom's *Indian Uprising on the Rio Grande: The Pueblo Revolt of 1680*; Alfonso Ortiz's *The Tewa World: Space, Time, Being, and Becoming in a Pueblo society*; Gary Witherspoon's *Navajo Kinship and Marriage*; and Keith Basso's *Portraits of "The Whiteman": Linguistic Play and Cultural Symbols Among the Western Apache*. In addition, we will view the Pubelo made documentary film *Surviving Columbus.*