Resources for Graduate Students

Grounded by a strong commitment to the worlds, histories, representations, and political struggles of Indigenous peoples locally and globally, the intellectual project of American Indian and Indigenous Studies (AIIS) uses interdisciplinary methods of critical inquiry as a means through which students engage research and scholarship in their major fields of study. An AIIS minor is composed of graduate coursework with core and affiliated Indigenous studies faculty in the Department of American Indian Studies and other departments. Students receive foundational training in one of three required courses: Indigenous Critical Theory, Problems in American Indian History, or American Colonialism and Indigenous Histories.

In addition, students choose (in consultation with the director of graduate studies) from graduate courses in a range of disciplines committed to Indigenous studies to tailor their work to their own scholarly needs. The AIIS graduate minor strengthens student work in their major field of study as AIIS minors will learn how to best integrate American Indian and Indigenous Studies into their existing work as well as how to complement their research to include indigenous methodologies.

Please visit the Graduate Minor in American Indian Studies homepage for information

The race, indigeneity, disability, gender, and sexuality (RIDGS) graduate minor gives students a grounding in the critical and comparative study of race, ethnicity, and indigeneity, as well as the interrogation of significant social categories of power and inequality, namely race, ethnicity, indigeneity, disability, gender, sexuality, class, sovereignty, and diaspora. This interdisciplinary minor foregrounds a transnational and comparative framework to analyze multiple forms of social difference and their interactions in relation to one another. While the focus is on the United States, given the minor’s attention to the making of social categories and borders, the analytical lens and purview of the minor will be transnational in scale and scope.

Anchored in analyses and understanding of power relations, structural inequality, and social justice through a relational and multidisciplinary approach, our seminars focus on the various interlinked processes that constitute the categories and groups in the first place, instead of taking for granted the a priori existence of separate groups, communities, experiences, and identities. This approach is at the vanguard of comparative race, ethnicity, and indigeneity, which is moving away from juxtaposing discrete groups and toward theorizing mutual constitution. Accordingly, this graduate minor privileges intersectionality, interdisciplinary, transnationalism, comparison, and relationality. What distinguishes this graduate minor is its conceptual and theoretical approach, which makes this program complementary to existing graduate degree programs at UMN, especially those with a strong disciplinary orientation.

Please visit the Graduate Minor in Race, Indigeneity, Disability, Gender, and Sexuality homepage for more information.