Indigenous Studies in the Americas: Home
What Is Indigenous Studies?
Introduction
From the UNC Anti-Racist Graduate Worker Collective:
"We recognize the land and sovereignty of Native and Indigenous nations in Chapel Hill, in North Carolina, in North America, and across the world. The University of North Carolina sits on the land of the Occaneechi, Shakori, Eno, and Sissipahaw peoples."
Indigenous Studies, also known as Native American or Native Studies, focuses on the past and present of native and indigenous people, also known as First Peoples. These cultures were the first known inhabitants of later colonized land, most commonly in the Western Hemisphere but also in other former European colonies like Australia. Its goal is to uncover, celebrate, and tell the stories of indigenous cultures that have been historically erased from mainstream history, anthropology, literature, and political science. It is interdisciplinary and includes legal and political studies, linguistics, art and anthropology, and modern indigenous civil and environmental rights movements.
Picture credit: Native American and Indigenous Studies Association
For more information:
- Visit the websites of the UNC American Indian Center and Institute for the Study of the Americas
- The University of New Mexico and University of Virginia have multiple LibGuides on Native American and Indigenous subjects, including Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, environmental activism, legal and governmental histories with Native nations, and more.
- Wilson Library's special collections have a significant amount of resources on indigenous peoples in North Carolina, with an accompanying LibGuide.
- The UNC Catalog contains multiple resources about indigenous studies, including:
Comparative Indigenous Studies by ISBN: 9783825365752Publication Date: 2016-02-01This volume explores the complexity, vibrancy, and contemporaneity of indigenous cultures today. It understands the concept of "Comparative Indigenous Studies" in such a transnational and interdisciplinary sense. It links indigenous communities in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and Asia. Bringing together scholars from the humanities and social sciences, from law, economics, cultural geography, and medicine, this book highlights the ways in which indigenous cultures have resisted, time and again, the myth of their own disappearance.
Critical Indigenous Studies by ISBN: 9780816532735Publication Date: 2016-09-20With increasing speed, the emerging discipline of critical Indigenous studies is expanding and demarcating its territory from Indigenous studies through the work of a new generation of Indigenous scholars. Critical Indigenous Studies makes an important contribution to this expansion, disrupting the certainty of disciplinary knowledge produced in the twentieth century, when studying Indigenous peoples was primarily the domain of non-Indigenous scholars. Aileen Moreton-Robinson's introductory essay provides a context for the emerging discipline. The volume is organized into three sections: the first includes essays that interrogate the embedded nature of Indigenous studies within academic institutions; the second explores the epistemology of the discipli≠ and the third section is devoted to understanding the locales of critical inquiry and practice. Each essay places and contemplates critical Indigenous studies within the context of First World nations, which continue to occupy Indigenous lands in the twenty-first century. The contributors include Aboriginal, Metis, Maori, Kanaka Maoli, Filipino-Pohnpeian, and Native American scholars working and writing through a shared legacy born of British and later U.S. imperialism. In these countries, critical Indigenous studies is flourishing and transitioning into a discipline, a knowledge/power domain where distinct work is produced, taught, researched, and disseminated by Indigenous scholars.
Queer Indigenous Studies by ISBN: 9780816529070Publication Date: 2011-03-15"This book is an imagining." So begins this collection examining critical, Indigenous-centered approaches to understanding gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, and Two-Spirit (GLBTQ2) lives and communities and the creative implications of queer theory in Native studies. This book is not so much a manifesto as it is a dialogue--a "writing in conversation"--among a luminous group of scholar-activists revisiting the history of gay and lesbian studies in Indigenous communities while forging a path for Indigenouscentered theories and methodologies. The bold opening to Queer Indigenous Studies invites new dialogues in Native American and Indigenous studies about the directions and implications of queer Indigenous studies. The collection notably engages Indigenous GLBTQ2 movements as alliances that also call for allies beyond their bounds, which the co-editors and contributors model by crossing their varied identities, including Native, trans, straight, non-Native, feminist, Two-Spirit, mixed blood, and queer, to name just a few. Rooted in the Indigenous Americas and the Pacific, and drawing on disciplines ranging from literature to anthropology, contributors to Queer Indigenous Studies call Indigenous GLBTQ2 movements and allies to center an analysis that critiques the relationship between colonialism and heteropatriarchy. By answering critical turns in Indigenous scholarship that center Indigenous epistemologies and methodologies, contributors join in reshaping Native studies, queer studies, transgender studies, and Indigenous feminisms. Based on the reality that queer Indigenous people "experience multilayered oppression that profoundly impacts our safety, health, and survival," this book is at once an imagining and an invitation to the reader to join in the discussion of decolonizing queer Indigenous research and theory and, by doing so, to partake in allied resistance working toward positive change.
Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies by ISBN: 9781315528823Publication Date: 2016-12-19Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies is a synthesis of changes and innovations in methodologies in Indigenous Studies, focusing on sources over a broad chronological and geographical range. Written by a group of highly respected Indigenous Studies scholars from across an array of disciplines, this collection offers insight into the methodological approaches contributors take to research, and how these methods have developed in recent years. The book has a two-part structure that looks, firstly, at the theoretical and disciplinary movement of Indigenous Studies within history, literature, anthropology, and the social sciences. Chapters in this section reveal that, while engaging with other disciplines, Indigenous Studies has forged its own intellectual path by borrowing and innovating from other fields. In part two, the book examines the many different areas with which sources for indigenous history have been engaged, including the importance of family, gender, feminism, and sexuality, as well as various elements of expressive culture such as material culture, literature, and museums. Together, the chapters offer readers an overview of the dynamic state of the field in Indigenous Studies. This book shines a spotlight on the ways in which scholarship is transforming Indigenous Studies in methodologically innovative and exciting ways, and will be essential reading for students and scholars in the field.
Collection Description
The Latin American and Iberian collections of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill support the broad range of research needs of Carolina's faculty and students in these world areas. Our holdings of over 500,000 volumes are primarily held in Walter Royal Davis Library, the central library for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The strength of the collections complements the research interests of the many graduate programs in the humanities and social sciences. In addition to acquiring materials in Spanish and Portuguese, our collections include volumes in several of the Maya languages, Guaraní, Galician, Catalán, Basque and Haitian Creole, among others.
Based on a long-standing cooperative agreement with Duke Univerity, UNC-Chapel Hill collects core materials from all Latin American countries, as well as research-level materials from Argentina, Brazil (humanities and literature), Chile, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Paraguay, Puerto Rico, Uruguay and Venezuela.
Researching Latin America
To learn more about the collection and how to research subjects in LAIR, see the Guide to Latin American & Iberian Library Resources.
Teresa Chapa, Latin American, Iberian and Latina/o Studies Librarian
