The Native American Studies Graduate Group's interdisciplinary and hemispheric approach includes attention to the increasing diaspora of indigenous peoples throughout the Americas, and calls upon the authority of native intelligence to address the issues that concern native peoples. Topics of study include history, religion, philosophy, government, politics, society, and language and linguistics, as well as indigenous community development for autonomy and sovereignty, colonialism, racism, and self-determination, and ethnohistory. At both the M.A. and Ph.D. levels, students have opportunities to develop their teaching skills through teaching assistant and instructor positions.<br><br>The DE in the Study of Religion provides graduate students with an interdisciplinary understanding of how religion in general has been conceptualized and studied historically and how these understandings continue to inform basic categories of thought, behavior and identity across the world and especially in the West. Rather than approaching religion as a fixed entity that informs change in other more dynamic fields (e.g. literature, culture, society, behavior), this program helps students think about the study of religion as historically variable, contextualized, and itself constitutive of the subject of inquiry.