Taught By:
Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles
Assistant Professor
Department of Geography
University of Victoria
Motivation for Teaching Social Action:
Learning more about how to effectively incorporate aspects of social action into my community engaged courses that I teach on Indigenous topics at the University.
Course Description:
In this course, students will critically analyze Indigenous activism in environmental contexts, its root causes, and the outlook of such acts into the future. Students begin exploring the ways in which colonization has wrought tremendous changes to Indigenous environments. Students then will turn their attention to the role of Indigenous environmental activism amidst the rise of Indigenous activism in the 1960s and 1970s, moving to the efforts of Indigenous nations and communities in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s to secure and assert rights related to the environment. Students then return to the current upswelling of Indigenous environmental activism, contemplating what this may mean for the environment, including both humans and more-than-human kin. Finally, students conclude the course by looking towards Indigenous conceptions of the future of their natural and political environments and what they might look like in an era of climate crisis. This course utilizes unique activities to evaluate and reinforce course concepts, including the simulated production of a podcast series as the main activity for the class.
