Indian Cities: Histories of Indigenous Urbanization ed. by Kent Blansett, Cathleen D. Cahill, and Andrew Needham

Abstract

Reviewed by: Indian Cities: Histories of Indigenous Urbanization ed. by Kent Blansett, Cathleen D. Cahill, and Andrew Needham Mikaëla M. Adams Indian Cities: Histories of Indigenous Urbanization. Edited by Kent Blansett, Cathleen D. Cahill, and Andrew Needham. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2022. Pp. x, 332. Paper, $32.95, ISBN 978-0-8061-7663-5.) Inspired by the seminal work of Philip Deloria in Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence, Kans., 2004) and Coll Thrush in Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place (Seattle, 2007), scholars of Native North America have increasingly pushed back against narratives that depict Indigenous people as rural, primitive, and premodern. Recent monographs by Andrew Needham, Colin Calloway, Daniel H. Usner, Laura M. Furlan, Kent Blansett, Douglas K. Miller, Nicolas G. Rosenthal, and Renya K. Ramirez—among others—have revealed the vibrant roles Indians have played in urban America as well as the creative ways that they have navigated and built lives in these metropolitan spaces. Far from being peripheral to the story of urbanization, Indigenous people, their lands, their resources, and their nations in fact have played a central role. Indian Cities: Histories of Indigenous Urbanization brings together cutting-edge scholarship on urban Native America and provides an important theoretical framework for making sense of this history in the context of American settler colonialism. Indian Cities is divided into four parts. Part 1 illuminates the savvy politicking of Indigenous people in colonial urban centers. As Nathaniel Holly reveals, ordinary Cherokees had “intimate knowledge” of the power structures of eighteenth-century Charlestown, South Carolina, which they used to access and define the terms of colonial trade (p. 27). Daniel H. Usner shows how the diplomatic rituals of Indigenous people in early New Orleans contributed to the “civic culture” of this port city, while also ensuring its survival through facilitating the exchange of goods and services (p. 52). [End Page 192] Part 2 turns to the nineteenth century and focuses on the ways that settler actions and mythmaking endeavored both to erase and to justify the erasure of Indigenous people from the nation’s burgeoning cities. Essays by Ari Kelman, Mishuana R. Goeman, C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa, and Maurice Crandall explore how settlers performed Indigenous dispossession and disappearance in urban locales as far-flung as St. Paul, Minnesota, Niagara Falls, New York, Washington, D.C., and the mining boomtowns of central Arizona. As the authors point out, Indigenous people did not passively accept their presumed fate but instead fought for acknowledgment of their ongoing presence. Part 3 includes tales from the best-known period of Indian urbanization—the post–World War II era of termination, relocation, and Red Power. Elaine Marie Nelson and Sasha Maria Suarez extend the chronology of this era by showcasing how Native people made and remade Rapid City, South Dakota, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, from the early twentieth century onward. They show how Native communities devised strategies to survive economically, gather inconspicuously, and organize politically, as Suarez puts it, “(re)indigenizing the space of the city” (p. 199). Meanwhile, Douglas K. Miller and David Hugill focus on postwar Indigenous efforts to create community institutions in Dallas, Texas, and Winnipeg, Manitoba, that linked Native residents both to other “Indians living in urban places” and to their reservation communities (p. 220). These narratives of community organizing honor the ingenuity and resourcefulness of Indigenous people as they reclaimed urbanized home-lands or forged new connections that allowed them to survive and thrive in distant metropolises. Part 4 brings the volume up to the present with insightful essays on the anti–Dakota Access Pipeline movement and the COVID-19 crisis. As Dana E. Powell and Jennifer Denetdale reveal, the consequences of American settler colonialism for urban development are far from over. Although each essay makes a valuable contribution, the standout works are by Genetin-Pilawa and Powell. Genetin-Pilawa’s analysis of the ways that various Indigenous delegates proclaimed their presence in the U.S. capital deftly challenges readers to “take the time to look” for “hidden Indian histories” that may not be so hidden after all (p. 133). Through her detailed description of the grassroots construction of the Oceti Sakowin camp in South Dakota, Powell reimagines...