Native Peoples of the Southwest

Course Description

We invite you to join Distinguished Outreach Professor Tom Sheridan for a six-week virtual course on the Native Peoples of the Southwest, particularly those of southern Arizona, and their interactions with the Spanish empire, the Mexican republic, and the United States over the last 500 years. The Southwest is a region that remained a frontier in the most basic sense of the term---a place where no group had a monopoly on violence---until the 1880s, when Geronimo and the Chiricahua Apaches surrendered for the final time. During those centuries, Native peoples living in the region like the Hopis and O’odham encountered two waves of newcomers---Athabaskan-speaking peoples from the north and Spaniards from the south. This class will focus on those encounters as well as the contemporary struggles of Native peoples to reclaim their tribal sovereignty and take control of their own destinies in the 21^st century.