This course as journey focuses on “decolonizing methodologies” through living voices: what it means to listen to and to respect narrative from an indigenous perspective. Beginning with short stories and intense immersion into alternate practices of literary engagement, the class will leave with respect for linguistics, a knowledge of the law, and an understanding of non-western as well as what is useful from western approaches to novels, oral narratives, memoir, ecological and non-fiction essays, documentary film, and poetry. Steeped in the study of verb-based language and the awareness of ceremony, these narratives question the tyranny of the temporal while instructing us in specific bonds of kinship. The project narrated into being by these authors revise past categories of point of view to guide us from the profane (see the U.N.’s definition of “cultural genocide”) to glimpses of a transformative conception of animacy as the sacred. The approach is both intratribal and, by accreting definition, comparative. Authors include: Stephen Graham Jones (Blackfeet), Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), Louise Erdrich (Anishinabe). LeAnne Howe (Choctaw), Louis Owens (Cherokee-Choctaw), and Deborah Miranda (Chumash).