Seminar, three hours. Beginning with 1550 debates over Indian humanity and ranging to contemporary scholarship about and by indigenous peoples, focus on intersections of writing, colonialism, violence, and historiography in Americas. Exploration of relationship between 16th-century reasoning about race and postmillennial, Western, and academic practices of writing history. Development of critical stance on utility of postcolonial theories as such perspectives bear on anthropological and historical studies of indigenous religiosity. Regions include southwest Columbia, Orinoco Delta in Venezuela, Valley of Mexico, and several examples throughout U.S. southwest, plains, and northeast. S/U or letter grading.