Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

Note: This is a HYBRID class. We will meet in-person at Southeast Campus on Wednesdays from 1-4pm, and we will have an additional 1 hour of Online work each week. Students who register for this class are expected to attend in-person on Wednesdays in order to participate in and pass the class. 

There is one required textbook for this class: Indigenous Children's Survivance in Public Schools by Leilani Sabzalian. You can either purchase or rent a copy from the PCC bookstore (or another bookseller), or you can use a free ebook available through the PCC Library as long as you are good with reading ebooks on a screen. (If I was a student in this class, I would personally go with the print book myself, but for students who prefer ebooks and/or don't want to spend money on a print book, the free ebook should do the trick. Thanks!)

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Osiyo / Hello!

NAS 201 is a course that introduces students to the interdisciplinary field of Native American / Indigenous Studies. 

My specialty as a teacher and researcher is Native American / Indigenous literatures. I'm a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, and I earned a PhD in English from UC Berkeley with an emphasis on Native literatures. I've published fiction and scholarship within this field, and as a professor I hope to inspire future generations of writers and audiences to engage new Indigenous stories.

It's been an honor for me to help develop the Native American Studies program here at PCC. Five years ago, we did not have any "NAS" courses at PCC. Now in 2024, we have multiple! I was the professor for the first section of NAS 201 at PCC in winter 2019, and we've run the course several times since then. I am grateful for the opportunity to work at PCC and build up this program and these courses. 

We aim to recognize and celebrate the remarkable diversity and vitality of Indigenous people in this class. To that end, all works studied in our class are produced by Native Americans. 

Coursework will involve:

• several readings, viewings, and/or podcasts each week
• in-person discussions when we meet on campus, to discuss and ask questions about the course content
• weekly Survey assignments where you can demonstrate that you've read/viewed/listened to the material for that week
• three Self-Assessments: an Initial, Midterm, and Final Self-Assessment that ask you to reflect on your relationship to course content and your work/effort in our class
• a Term Project of your own design (you will have a great deal of freedom in determining your own topic for the Project, as well as the medium that you work in)

For students interested in transferring to universities, please know this course can transfer as core credit to all public universities in Oregon and to most universities in the USA. 

Although it's not yet reached this stage... I personally think that this course should be required for all students at all institutions of higher education in the USA :-) Perhaps someday, it will be.

Please contact me if you have any questions about this course: blake.hausman@pcc.edu

Wado / Thank you! -- 

Dr Blake Hausman

This is a hybrid course, meeting for 4 hours per week -- 3 hours In-person on Wednesdays, and 1 hour Online.

You will need the basics for a course with online components -- a computer or tablet with Internet access, and a word processing program for composing your own writing. No additional technology requirements beyond that. If you can access the course website in D2L, and if you can access your PCC email, then you have the technology necessary to complete this class.

If you prefer to use Microsoft Word to write documents, then you will need to have your own copy of that program. But you could also use Google Docs, which is available to everyone through the PCC Google suite. You also have the option of making audio or video recordings for your work in NAS 201, instead of writing them. Ultimately, you will need to use a computer application for doing the coursework in NAS 201, but you can choose which application you use and which kind of media you prefer to work in.