Reviewed by: Settler Colonial City: Racism and Inequity in Postwar Minneapolis by David Hugill Sarah E. Nelson Settler Colonial City: Racism and Inequity in Postwar Minneapolis. David Hugill. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021. Pp vii+212, black & white illustrations, endnotes. $100.00, hardcover, ISBN 978-1-5179-0479-1. $25.00, paperback, ISBN 978-1-5179-0480-7. David Hugill's historical geography of Minneapolis, analyzed through the lens of settler colonialism, deftly intervenes into major conversations of its time and place, including urban indigenous experiences and racialized policing. With a preface that describes the author using their daughter's bedroom as a home office during COVID-19 lockdowns, and an epilogue centered on Ronald Reagan's 1988 visit to the Soviet Union, Hugill interweaves time, place, and politics in unexpected and illuminating ways. The framework uniting Hugill's examination of a variety of sites and situations within postwar Minneapolis is "the predatory violence of settler colonization and its valorization of the territorial and social claims of Euro-Americans over and above those of the people they sought to replace as the rightful users and occupiers of the land" (3). Hugill stresses that "neither do those accumulations belong to the past. Advantages acquired through dispossession endure as a dynamic force of economic and cultural power, even to this day" (3). Each of the four chapters in this intriguing and insightful book focuses on a different element of Minneapolis history, read through a settler-colonial lens. Chapter 1 traces how suburbanization and urban renewal have limited the opportunities available to indigenous people in Minneapolis, as well as how indigenous social and political organizing gave rise to the Phillips neighborhood as a center of indigenous urban life in the decades following the Second World War. Chapter 2 examines non-indigenous advocacy in Minneapolis during the same time period, illuminating the underlying assumptions, driven by settler colonial advantage, within liberal anti-racism movements. Chapter 3 highlights the impact of racialized, targeted policing on indigenous communities, including the disproportionate number of indigenous people arrested on minor charges. Chapter 4 examines the contested role of the Honeywell Corporation as a local employer—a "global technology giant" (120) that, during the Second World War, began manufacturing a range of weapons technologies, at the same time offering jobs to unemployed or underemployed [End Page 110] indigenous community members through the Honeywell Foundation and Phillips Works initiatives. Hugill theoretically links these four seemingly separate but interrelated cases, by demonstrating how they illuminate major features of settler colonialism in Minneapolis through the latter half of the twentieth century up until the present day. Using a diverse range of examples, Hugill shows how settler-colonial biases appear in sometimes unexpected places, as in the work of the League of Women Voters of Minnesota and the Training Center for Community Programs from the University of Minnesota, who worked hard to advocate for indigenous communities in the city and yet betrayed stereotyped assumptions about the people in these communities and visions of change that ultimately remained rooted in the status quo. Settler-colonial cities are distinguished by their being "primarily oriented around the enrichment of localized settler constituencies" (16), as opposed to colonial cities whose goal was the enrichment of a distant metropole. In addition, in settler-colonial cities, the settler-colonial relationship endures; as Patrick Wolfe famously puts it, "invasion is a structure not an event" (2006, 388). In important ways, Hugill's work intersects with scholarship on racialized generational wealth gaps in the United States, highlighting how settler colonialism and institutionalized racism continue to work hand in hand to deliver disproportionate advantages to settler-colonial Americans, the majority of whom are white. Hugill is careful to point out that settler colonialism, although pervasive, is not all-powerful: "as Audra Simpson demonstrates, colonialism endures in its settler mode but continues to fall short of its own objectives" (8). Indigenous economies were thriving before settlers arrived and have been maintained in spite of settler colonialism. Indigenous peoples' reactions and resistances to settler colonialism have shaped North American cities in ways that are often effaced in popular and academic discourse. Hugill asserts that "reservation" and "city" geographies are intrinsically linked, and that...
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Jul 2, 2024
Fabrício Germano Alves + 1
Open Access