Native American Studies Program

A Native American Studies Program has been unanimously voted by the Dartmouth Faculty of Arts and Sciences, to take effect July 1 of this year.

As proposed by an ad hoc faculty committee, NAS will be a program rather than a department and will be interdisciplinary in character. In this respect it will have a format similar to Environmental Studies and Urban and Regional Studies.

The faculty approved a core of four courses, to be supplemented by regular offerings in various departments of the undergraduate college. The four new courses will be "Introduction to Native American Studies," "Native American Studies: The Contemporary Society," "Independent Reading," and "Seminar in Native American Studies."

In approving the program, the faculty also recommended the appointment of a new faculty member to serve as NAS chairman and created a coordinating committee to be responsible for the academic offerings in the program.

The vote also called for a written evaluation of the program, in both its academic and budgetary aspects, to be made during the 1975-76 academic year. It is to be made by the Faculty Committee on Instruction and also by an outside team which would include Native American scholars.

Initial support of the program will be by allocation of money from a Ford Foundation Venture Fund granted to Dartmouth in August 1970. The grant placed at the disposal of President Kemeny "discretionary funds for special efforts to enrich the liberal education of undergraduates."

In making its report, the ad hoc committee stated that the College now offers virtually no course that deals substantively with the Native American experience, and in addition to proposing the new NAS courses it recommended the introduction of Native American content in all departments in the social sciences and humanities. Key departments for participation in the NAS Program, the committee said, are Anthropology, Art, Comparative Literature, Drama, Education, English, Government, History, Language Study, Music, Philosophy, Religion, and Sociology.

It is expected that, of the four new NAS courses, "Introduction to Native American Studies" and "Independent Reading" will be offered in 1972-73, the other two courses in 1973-74.

The introductory course will concentrate on traditional Native American culture, with a major emphasis on the pre-Columbian period. A major focus will be on beliefs, values, and art forms. The independent reading course will permit the pursuit in depth of some subject in Native American Studies not currently offered by the College.

The seminar course will involve the student in an independent research project. "Native American Studies: The Contemporary Society" will focus on the role of Indian peoples in modern society, including study of the reservation system, the rural Indian, the urban Indian, Indian education, and the conflict of values. Comparison will be made with Canada and Latin America.