HUM 221: Another term paper topic

If you're taking Humanities 221 (Native American cultures), this blog's for you --

As ideas for term paper topics come to me, I'll be posting them to the blog. You can find them by scrolling down and looking for the course prefix in the title line, or clicking on the "SEARCH THIS BLOG" icon and doing a keyword search on "HUM 221." For starters, I posted 8-10 suggestions at the beginning of the week.

Here's another idea some of my students have found valuable in the past. If you have Native heritage, or if you have stories in your family that a great-grandmother or grandfather was an American Indian, you can try to find out more about it and write a paper on that research. Obviously, how you do it would vary from family to family. Many people have only vague stories and maybe an old black-and-white picture or two. Not uncommonly, even the name of their ancestor's tribe is uncertain. But whatever you have is enough to start with. You can ask living relatives what they've heard, who else in the family might have information. Then you can background the family stories with library and internet research. In southern and central Illinois, a lot of people have Cherokee ancestry because so many of the early white settlers in our part of the state came from Cherokee country in the southern Appalachians. And my African American students over the years have done papers on Cherokee or Seminole Indians in their families. For those who have that family heritage, just finding out more about it is a valuable research endeavor.

As always, when I suggest topics ... keep in mind my suggestions are only suggestions. You can, and should, modify them to suit your own interests and circumstances.