Seminar Schedule July 2 - August 3, 2012
For participants who are able to arrive a few days before the first week of our seminar, we will visit the Lummi Reservation, a few miles from Bellingham, for the annual Stommish: a salmon and canoe-racing festival that draws competitors from throughout the U.S. and Canada (and at times Hawaii and New Zealand).
All participants will meet, though, during a casual, welcoming salmon barbeque at Professor Purdy’s home. This will be funded by the Department of English and the director, with the chair of the department attending to welcome our participants.
Movies
Note: all movies will be on ready reserve in Wilson Library so that participants can check them out for viewing in their residences throughout the course of the seminar. A viewing room in the library will be reserved each Wednesday evening for two hours, and the viewing lounge in the residences will be booked for Thursday evenings. I will also reserve other movies that are not to be assigned, but that the participants may find useful. I also have personal copies of all the core movies, which will be available, except for those times I wish to use them in the seminar.
Selective Film List
We will reserve films for our participants’ use, either in their apartments or in our reserved viewing room in the library. The films noted in the schedule will be reserved for our use, but also:
The American Indian Collection; Sharing Legends of the Upper Skagit (Vi Hilbert) local storytelling; Surviving Columbus: The Story of the Pueblo People; Itam Hakim Hopiit Hopi stories by Victor Masayesva; Running on the Edge of the Rainbow an interview with Leslie Silko; Last Stand at Little Big Horn the film version of Welch’s Killing Custer; Smoke Signals and The Business of Fancydancing by Chris Eyre from the works of Sherman Alexie; Edge of America Chris Eyre; Healing Our Spirits a documentary
Week One | Week Two | Week Three | Week Four | Week Five
Week One: Orientation and Introduction
Core Text: D’Arcy McNickle (Métis) The Surrounded (1936). Zia Books, University of New Mexico Press (1977).
Monday
Dr. Bruce Shepard, President of the University, will greet the participants.
Orientation: facilities, forms and photos.
Monday morning visitor: Sharon Kinley (Lummi), Director of the Coast Salish Institute on the Lummi Reservation: Salish Language, Literature and Culture today.
Lunch with visitor.
Monday afternoon:
Wilson Library: Jeanne Armstrong, Humanities librarian, for an orientation of the library’s information systems and holdings in Native American Studies.
Tuesday
McNickle’s biography.
Movies: The Box of Daylight (twelve minutes), and excerpts from The Last of the Mohicans,the 1936 version, which was the year of publication for the core novel.
Discussions of supplemental texts and the core novel.
Note: throughout the seminar, each participant will be assigned three critical essays as well as all the ethnographic readings. I trust that each participant will then bring the critical and cultural issues from the supplemental readings into the discussions of the core novels and thereby generate a true seminar: an organic exchange of ideas and insights.
Readings:
Essays from Smoothing the Ground (Swann), Reading the Fire (Ramsey), Recovering the Word: Essays on Native American Literature (Swann and Krupat), Red on Red (Womack) and American Indian Literary Nationalism (Weaver and Womack, Warrior).
Ethnographic Texts: Indian Legends of the Pacific Northwest and Indian Legends from the Northern Rockies, both by Ella E. Clark. (These provide several stories that are found in The Surrounded.)
Wednesday (July 4)
Evening: Movie screening of Place of the Falling Waters. Produced in Montana, this is the story of the Salish struggle to maintain traditional control over resources, in light of the pressures of contemporary society. It offers visuals of the reservation that is the location of The Surrounded, including historical footage of people mentioned in the novel. The movie’s concern with the building of a dam is echoed in McNickle’s last novel, Wind from an Enemy Sky. (As noted above, this will also be available on Thursday evening and throughout the week end.)
Thursday
McNickle’s biography.
Discussion of the novel with participant reports on McNickle’s other novels: Runner in the Sun: A Story of Indian Maize (1954), Wind from an Enemy Sky (1978) and The Hungry Generations (2007) which is the first draft of The Surrounded but a very different novel. We will circulate a list of later books by our core authors to the participants once they are selected so that they may read these in advance of the seminar if they choose.
Friday
UBC Museum of Anthropology trip.