Ü/PS (Cult): Indigenous Experiences on Turtle Island

North America or Turtle Island, as many Indigenous populations have named the continent, is home to hundreds of Indigenous groups with distinct languages, cultures, religions, and societal structures. Even though each Indigenous community is unique, they all share a crucial historical experience, namely settler colonialism. There is not a single Indigenous group on Turtle Island that did not experience settler colonialism and the forms of systemic violence accompanying it one way or the other. Patrick Wolfe famously argued that settler colonialism is a “structure rather than an event” (390), highlighting its scope, depth, and ongoing impact on the daily lives of Indigenous peoples globally. In this seminar, we will look at how Indigenous peoples respond, resist, make fun of, disrupt, and overall complicate the settler colonial project. We will zoom in on particular events and Indigenous cultural works as responses in the history of the US and Canada. Moreover, we will look at Hollywood’s fascination with Indigeneity in the twentieth century, the Native American occupation of Alcatraz of 1969, the role of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), and more. Additionally, we will address the “Indianthusiam” in Germany and more broadly in Europe, as manifested in Karl May’s Winnetou and Hergé’s The Adventures of Tintin, among others. We will set the scene with terminology and definitions, then move to more specific themes such as institutional interventions, i.e., allotment and the assimilation era and residential schools. We will also take a closer look at Indigenous stereotypes such as the “noble savage” and discuss Hollywood’s role in making these stereotypes mainstream.

Works Cited
Wolfe, Patrick. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 8, no. 4, 2006, pp. 387–409. https://doi.org/10.1080/14623520601056240