Collecting, naming, and organizing local knowledge(s) were important activities to practitioners of the sciences in the past. This course takes a close look at natural history collecting and its entanglements with colonizing projects, the history of capitalism and the displacement of indigenous peoples since c. 1500. Using special collections materials and engagement with regional natural history collections, it considers the legacies of historical links between collecting and appropriation, while also introducing students to ongoing efforts to respond to these legacies by contemporary curators and scholars. Open only to new first-year students.