The following questions should guide your research and writing:
Whose land do you/have you
live(d) on, call(ed) “home,” play(ed) on, worship(ped) on, or study(ied) on?
How do settler colonial stories shape your relationships with this land?
How might you push back against these hegemonic “stories”?
OVERALL
For this final step of the Land Biography, you will draw on the work you’ve done in the first two steps, write a coherent essay of 5-7 pages. Your essay must make an argument that addresses the above questions in some fashion, draws on course materials, and is backed up with research.
Paper must also include a serious and specific consideration of what could be done differently in the place you studied to undermine the hegemony of settler colonial logics.
For step three, you will build on this work you have been doing in order to produce a more finish essay that will consider how settler stories have shaped the way you interact with, or know, the place and how they efface Native stories of the same place. You will need to use the attached materials to articulate the effects of settler colonialism on creating the place as it is known (as you know, and interact with it), and to respectfully note that part of the reason you (or others) know it as you do is because settler stories and logics erase Native stories and logics. Could there be other ways of knowing, and interacting with this place?
Requirements for Step Three
Your paper must be approximately 5-7 pages long. (It is OK to write more as long as you edit carefully so that all your writing is important for your analysis.)
You must cite — and carefully draw on — must include the attached three readings in addition to your research.
You get to choose which readings, but they should be logically selected to support the claims/arguments you are making.
To “draw on” the reading means to quote from specific relevant passages, then to explain the passage and how it helps you to state your answer to the question.
Assume you are writing for people who have not taken this class, and are not familiar with settler colonialism, and carefully use the materials to explain all the ideas you use from the reading/the course.
Always provide page numbers for direct quotations and cite all your sources carefully, consistently, and correctly using either MLA or APA citation styles.
Aim to write a paper that demonstrates your careful research and careful reading of the course materials, as well as your understanding of the readings and relevant concepts.
Your paper must be organized around supporting an argument. This argument must address the questions listed above, or how the place you know is shaped by settler colonialism (with the ways it produces particular ideas of race, kinship, gender, property, and nature).
In other words, your argument should be the main lesson(s) you learned researching stories about the place in light of what we have learned about settler colonialism and how it is established through heteropatriarchy, gender, race, and property
You should state your argument in an introduction that introduces your place and what you want readers to know, based on your research.
Somewhere in your paper you must explain settler colonialism and how it has impacted your place. Here, you can include the ways in which settler norms of gender, race, property, and nature have larger impacts than most people expect. This is a good place to draw on the reading.
Your paper must explain that Native stories are covered up by settler colonialism, consider why, and the effects.
This is a good place to draw on your research.
Try not to make claims that extend beyond what you can know based on your research. If you don’t know something, just state that.
Your paper should have a conclusion in which you repeat your argument and perhaps gesture toward anything you were not able to address in the paper. Your ideas for reframing, or addressing the harms or injustices of settler colonialism could go here.
your creative connections, how well you research the place and its stories, the flow of your story telling/essay, and how compellingly you use the course reading, as well as technical issues such as proofreading and editing. If you’ve read these instructions carefully all the way through, please add the following sentence at the very end of your paper: “It matters what stories tell stories.”
