Starting this fall, the students at Portland State University will have an opportunity to study the history of Native peoples, their values and contemporary issues concerning them.
University’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences announced a major in Indigenous Nations and Native American Studies on Thursday, which covers various topics like decolonizing methodologies, traditional and cultural ecological knowledge, critical studies and tribal race theory.
Earlier, the university offered a minor in Indigenous studies. The major has been assigned to two full-time faculty members.
“It just is so important to finally recognize, intellectually, the bedrock significance of indigenous experiences,” Winston Grady-Willis, director of the School of Gender, Race, and Nations said.
“Not only historically, not only in this ongoing effort to stave off genocide, but also contemporarily in terms of the complexities that comes with even beginning to have a sense of indigenous ways of knowing.”
According to university, the first graduates of the program would receive their degrees in spring or summer of 2019.