While earning an AIIS undergraduate minor, you'll explore the complex histories and contemporary situations of Indigenous communities in North America and across the globe. Our faculty teach AIIS courses in diverse range of topics, including art, art history, anthropology, archaeology, education, fiber science and apparel design, law, linguistics, literature, natural resources, performing and media arts, and more. With an undergraduate minor in American Indian and Indigenous Studies, you are uniquely competitive as a multidisciplinary and extradisciplinary thinker.

Undergraduate Requirements

Our academic minor in American Indian and Indigenous Studies (AIIS) is available to undergraduate students in any college at Cornell. The minor is earned upon the completion of five courses (a minimum of 15 credits), which must include:

  • Two required courses, AIIS 1100 (AMST 1600, ANTHR 1700) and AIIS 1110 (AMST 1601)
  • Three additional courses:
    • One must be from Arts & Humanities and another from Social & Natural Sciences
    • One must be at the 3000 or 4000 level
    • Only one Independent Study (AIIS 4970) worth 3 or more credits may count towards the minor
  • Courses must be completed with a letter grade of "C" or above
  • Course taken for S/U and First-Year Writing Seminars do not count towards the minor

Courses

  • AIIS 1100 (AMST 1600, ANTHR 1700) - Indigenous North America
  • AIIS 1110 (AMST 1601) - Indigenous Issues in Global Perspectives
  • AIIS 2100 (AMST 2180, ARTH 2101) - Indigenous Ingenuities as Living Networks
  • AIIS 2240 (LING 2248) - Native American Languages
  • AIIS 2390 (AMST 2390, HIST 2390) - Seminar in Iroquois History
  • AIIS 2600 (AMST 2600, ENGL 2600) - Introduction to Native American Literature
  • AIIS 2660 (AMST 2660, HIST 2660) - Everything You Know about Indians is Wrong: Unlearning Native American History
  • AIIS 2850 - Indigenous Representation in Still and Motion Photography
  • AIIS 3560 (AMST 3562, ENGL 3560) - Thinking from a Different Place: Indigenous Philosophies
  • AIIS 4200 (AMST 4220, PHIL 4941) - Locke and the Philosophies of Dispossession: Indigenous America's Interruptions and Resistances
  • AIIS 4300 - Indigenous Peoples and Decolonial Philosophies
  • AIIS 4625 (AMST 4627, ENGL 4625) - Contemporary Native American Fiction
  • AIIS 4670 (AMST 4670, ENGL 4670) - The Indigenous Poetry of Resistance
  • AIIS 4674 (AMST 4674, HIST 4674) - Dispossession, Truth, and Reconciliation
  • AIIS 4900 (AMST 4900, ENGL 4900) - New World Encounters, 1500-1800
  • ARTH 4774 (ART 3874, ANTHR 4774) - Indigenous Spaces and Materiality
  • HIST 1950 (LATA 1950) - The Invention of the Americas, 1450-1850
  • AIIS 2350 (AMST 2350, ANTHR 2235, ARKEO 2235) - Archaeology of North American Indians
  • AIIS 2240 (LING 2248) - Native American Languages
  • AIIS 2420 (ANTHR 2420, BSOC 2420) - Nature/Culture: Ethnographic Approaches to Human-Environment Relations
  • AIIS 3324 (LING 3324) - Cayuga Language and Culture I
  • AIIS 3325 (LING 3325) - Cayuga Language and Culture II
  • AIIS 3330 (AMST 3330, NTRES 3330) - Ways of Knowing: Indigenous and Local Ecological Knowledge
  • AIIS 3422 (ANTHR 3422) - Culture, Politics, and Environment in the Circumpolar North
  • AIIS 3248 (AMST 3248, ANTHR 3248, ARKEO 3248) - Finger Lakes and Beyond: Archaeology of the Native Northeast
  • AIIS 4000 - Critical Approaches to American Indian and Indigenous Studies: Intellectual History
  • AIIS 4600 (ANTHR 4260, ARKEO 4260) - Analyzing White Springs
  • AIIS 4720 (AMST 4272, ANTHR 4272, ARKEO 4272) - Archaeology of Colonialism and Cultural Entanglement
  • AIIS 4770 - Haudenosaunee-New York State Relations
  • AIIS 4970 - Independent Study (taken with an AIIS faculty supervisor)