AMST216

The practice of photography has a complicated history with regards to Indigenous American communities and cultures. The extensive photographs of Indigenous Americans created by Edward Curtis even now hold sway over America’s collective imaging of Indigenous American culture. And yet the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are rich with photographies of Indigenous Americans, representing themselves through the medium, new and vibrant ways of seeing, understanding, and representing Indigenous American cultures and histories. In this course, we begin with an overview study of how the process of colonization (specifically as it occurred in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the era after the invention of photography), deployed the camera and photography to assert discursive control over Indigenous Americans. From that painful history, we move into study of the later twentieth century and early twenty-first century studying lens-based photographic and filmic works of contemporary Indigenous American artists. The goal of the course is to explore and better understand how the photographic image, as leveraged by Indigenous Americans, redresses and decolonizes the social landscape of our United States, and to honor the art works of these photographers.