CORRECTION: Due to sourcing and reporting errors, an earlier version of this story incorrectly stated the university was only offering two Native American-focused courses this semester. The university offers three courses.
Nearly a year after the American Indian Student Union and its allies secured four more semesters of the only two Native American-centered courses offered at this university, they’re back for more.
Although hiring more faculty members to teach new courses of any kind is unlikely in the near future due to a university-wide hiring freeze and the state’s dwindling budget, a Student Government Association bill demands more Native American studies courses and the hiring of more faculty to teach them. The resolution will be brought before the legislature for a vote next week by North Hill legislator Natalia Cuadra-Saez.
For Cuadra-Saez, Native American studies has been a key issue since she went on an alternative spring break trip last year to South Dakota, where the rampant poverty on the Pine Ridge Reservation inspired her to champion the cause. But as a history major, the junior legislator said the lack of courses focusing on Native Americans was obvious to her as soon as she came to the university.
“It’s an injustice over there, but it’s also an injustice over here,” she said.
Last spring, administrators announced plans to cut the two existing Native American-focused courses — Film Images of Native Americans, Introduction to Native American Cultures of the United States and American Indians in Film and Literature: Perspectives North and South — citing budget constraints, although they eventually yielded to student pressure to keep them.
When Native American-centered courses were threatened in the past, administrators cited a lack of resources and a lack of interest as justification for shutting them down — many of the courses went unfilled for semesters.
But professor Suzanne Gordon, who teaches the survey class, said there’s more to the story behind the university’s decision to get rid of the courses than money.
“The main problem is a lack of understanding why indigenous knowledge systems and cultural worldviews are important to us today,” she said. “There’s a lot of wisdom there that Western people in their arrogance assumed was just primitive nonsense, and it’s very profound knowledge of our universe and our role in it.”
“Given that we’re on Indian land, everybody, every American today, is standing on land that was taken from American Indians, why do we know so little about them?” she added.
AISU President Erin DeRiso said population is another setback. Although majors or minors exist for African American, Jewish, Latina/o and Asian American studies, DeRiso said it’s the size of the Native American minority group at the university — just 0.3 percent of undergraduates self-identify as Native American, the smallest population at the university — that precludes the existence of more courses.
“The reason that we have a Jewish Studies and Asian American Studies and African American and Latino studies is because the demographics on campus reflect that,” she said. “The challenge for American Indian students … [is that] they have to make up for the lack of numbers with passion and with zealous action.”
Cuadra-Saez said she has been working with the AISU on bringing the demand for more courses to the attention of administrators. She said she’s not asking for any money through the bill, though more classes would likely require more faculty.
“The university hires professors every year … people leave, people retire, and you have to replace them,” she said. “We’re not asking for any funds to be thrown anywhere … . We’re asking for a change in priorities and attitude.”
Cuadra-Saez said she believes her bill is the logical follow-up to preserving the courses last spring.
“We were on the defensive last year. … This is more of a proactive bill to take it a step further,” she said. “Just keeping the two courses that we have is not nearly enough.”
aisaacs@umdbk.com
