Unit 4: Resilience and Resistance

Central Questions

How do individuals and communities demonstrate resilience in the face of oppression, trauma, or displacement?

In what ways can survival itself be an act of resistance?

How do stories of endurance, identity, and heritage help us understand different forms of resistance?

What role does literature play in preserving cultural memory and resisting erasure?

Unit Overview

This unit explores resilience and resistance through storytelling, focusing on how words can promote survival and healing. This unit emphasizes personal and cultural perseverance, showing how remembering language and heritage can be acts of resistance. Students will analyze narratives of displacement, systemic oppression, and survival, examining how language preserves histories, challenges dominant narratives, and gives voice to the silenced. The unit will also explore language as a mediator of reality, studying topics like the death and suppression of language, particularly in contexts such as Native boarding schools.