How does US society use the concept of private property to mask disposession of Native American lands? How did land get transferred from Indian hands to US society?  And mindful of the DAPL protests in our feeds, how are Indians reclaiming the land today? And perhaps the most provocative question of all, why don’t we know about conflicts between Indians and US society over the land we are literally standing on?

Our students will explore the Indian-US conflicts that underlie the communities where our colleges are located.  But this course is not like others–no paper at the end, instead a student-created web site.  And we don’t have all the answers–students will work in pairs to uncover which Indian communities held the land underneath their college towns and how it got transferred.  We will show how to do archival work with case studies of the Wampanoag in Plymouth Plantation, and the Kumeyaay in San Diego.