A Veterans’ Talking Circle: Urban Indian Peoplehood and Re-Indigenizing Places

Abstract

While the boundaries of Indigeneity as a category are generally contested in Indian country, urban spaces provide opportunities for affinity and multiple expressions of Indigenous identity to coexist and even thrive. In Albuquerque, like many major cities, inter-tribal Indian identity centered on grassroots political activity increasingly recognizes Indigeneity as transnational and hemispheric, meaning that Indigenous peoples migrating from other parts of the Americas or around the world contribute to its greater Indigenous diversity (Ramirez 2007). Urban Indians in Albuquerque are composed of multiple peoples from diverse national and tribal identities, however, their points of convergence in the city, such as in ceremonial, sovereignty, and stewardship contexts enables a transnational expression of peoplehood to emerge. Indigenous sovereignty has been theorized as an articulation of peoplehood, defined by scholars as the persistence of a people who share a sacred history, religion, language, and land (Holm, Pearson, and Chavis 2003). In this article, I explore the ways urban Indian peoplehood emerges from the re-Indigenizing praxis of material life, such as talking circles, ceremony, and pottery-making, reflecting the generative culture making Native studies scholars call resurgence (Simpson 2011) and that moves away from essentialist and static definitions of Native identity that rely on blood quantum (Smith 2015).