Humanities Initiatives for Faculty: Tribal Colleges and Universities

Three faculty members at a tribal college in the Northwest propose developing a new curriculum on world indigenous communities. After preliminary investigation of scholarship in this area, they decide to concentrate on broadening an existing collaboration with Ainu colleagues in northern Japan. They will collect resource materials on Ainu history, culture, and art and create a Web site linking the two communities. With faculty from a second tribal college, they will also organize a series of monthly seminars on cultural revivals among other indigenous peoples in Australia, Siberia, and northern Finland, providing context for their study of the Ainu, and preparing for the eventual growth of the curriculum on the Ainu into an academic minor on world indigenous cultures. Guest speakers will include an art historian, an anthropologist, a literature professor, and a religious studies specialist from a nearby state university.

Faculty from a wide range of humanities disciplines, such as world history, Middle Eastern studies, English, foreign languages, Asian studies, art history, and music, will hold a series of twelve seminar meetings over the course of the academic year to examine the nature of epic literature. Participants will read major epic works in their entirety, or, as appropriate, selections from them. In the seminars, participants might read texts such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Vergil's Aeneid, the Niebelungenlied, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, Firdausi's Shanahmah, the Chanson de Roland, El Cid, Dante's Divine Comedy, Milton's Paradise Lost, Joyce's Ulysses, and Derek Walcott's Omeros. Topics of special focus will include critical approaches to understanding oral and written epic, the nature of the epic hero, techniques of epic narrative, and the enduring impact of epic on culture and national consciousness. As appropriate, participants will report on classic critical works, such as Alfred Lord's Singer of Tales and C. S. Lewis's preface to Paradise Lost. Visiting scholars from other colleges and universities will enhance the faculty seminars, and participants will discuss ways in which they might incorporate their studies into their ongoing teaching and research. The budget will include funds to acquire a core collection of epic literature for the college library.

Faculty at a Tribal College in the Midwest will develop cultural materials for teaching the Ojibwe language and French. Faculty members will develop a cultural component for both languages, beginning with simple vocabulary items that have cultural meanings at the elementary level and progressing to extended narratives at the advanced level. In this component they will include an element on cultural contacts in both language courses, allowing for some overlapping sessions, conducted in English, on contacts between the two cultures. In the Ojibwe language course, the faculty will work together with colleagues in history, the social sciences, and the arts to develop materials for teaching about the Ojibwe people's contact with other American Indian cultures, with French traders and missionaries, and with English-speaking settlers in the Midwest. In the French course, participants will study intercultural contacts and discuss how they would incorporate related materials into courses across the disciplines. Texts would include French travelers' accounts of the peoples of the Americas (especially in the Great Lakes region) in the early modern period.

Faculty members from a Tribal College's Division of Associated Health Sciences will revise "Introduction to Clinical Medicine," a required core course, so that it integrates humanities texts and methods of narrative analysis. Over the course of an academic year, faculty will read primary texts such as Aristotle's The Nicomachaean Ethics, Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Resident Patient," Roddy Doyle's The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, and John Cheever's "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill," coupled with secondary works, including Sheila Rothman's Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History, Kathryn Montgomery-Hunter's Doctors' Stories: The Narrative Structure of Medical Knowledge, Anne Hunsaker Hawkins and M.C. McEntyre's Teaching Literature and Medicine; and Rita Charon and Martha Montello's Stories Matter: The Role of Narrative in Medical Ethics. Toward the end of the year, faculty will develop learning modules in which literary stories are used to teach communication skills required for interviewing people from various walks of life in clinical settings. A guest scholar, who teaches literature and medicine at another university, will meet periodically with the working group to review the development of the modules.