A part of 2.2 Lightning Talk session

Krista Maxwell, Assistant Professor, Anthropology, FAS
Katherine Patton, Assistant Professor Teaching Stream, Anthropology, FAS

As anthropologists, we are increasingly aware of the importance of challenging our discipline’s historical and ongoing complicity in settler colonialism in our teaching as well as our research. Here, we propose a teaching model that centers often marginalized expertise and experience as a tool for learning disciplinary historical consciousness and reflexivity that may be of interest to other disciplines. At the heart of our newly-developed online course Anthropologists & Indigenous Peoples in North America are five guest lectures from a diverse selection of Indigenous speakers, including community leaders as well as academics. Students learn from situated accounts of the historical and ongoing harms anthropologists have caused Indigenous peoples – desecration of graves, institutionalization of ancestors and treasures, the discursive violence of the “vanishing native” and other harmful tropes — as well as contemporary examples of Indigenous challenges to the discipline, and hopeful prospects for collaboration. In our paper, we outline how we prepare students for each guest speaker using background lectures, tutorials, and carefully-selected readings, as well as subsequent assignments. The course has received enthusiastic feedback from students and we think shows much promise for broadening student understandings and respect for Indigenous knowledge within and beyond the academy.