I came to Indigenous history through the experience as a settler growing up at the edge of a reservation. I also love cities as “texts,” and the ways in which urban places never fully erase what came before. These two interests led me to urban Indigenous studies. Urban and Indigenous histories are often treated as though they are mutually exclusive, when in fact they are deeply entangled with each other: for example, the majority of Indigenous people in the United States live in urban areas. These works capture the rich history of migration, political organizing, and cultural production that has taken place in Indigenous cities.
I wrote
Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire
This collection of short stories draws from Van Alst’s experience as a Native American growing up in Chicago, where racism and gang violence were everyday realities. Gripping and uncompromising, the stories walk a line between the traumas of Indigenous life in America and the possibilities of resilience and resistance.
Growing up in a gang in the city can be dark. Growing up Native American in a gang in Chicago is a whole different story. This book takes a trip through that unexplored part of Indian Country, an intense journey that is full of surprises, shining a light on the interior lives of people whose intellectual and emotional concerns are often overlooked. This dark, compelling, occasionally inappropriate, and often hilarious linked story collection introduces a character who defies all stereotypes about urban life and Indians. He will be in readers' heads for a long time to come.
LaPier and Beck’s book is the perfect backstory to Van Alst’s.
Chicago, built on the lands of the Three Fires Council, has a long history as an Indigenous metropolis, from activism around the famous 1893 World’s Fair to the building of urban Indian organizations. The authors show how Indigenous people are everywhere in the archives.
Robert G. Athearn Award from the Western History Association
In City Indian Rosalyn R. LaPier and David R. M. Beck tell the engaging story of American Indians who migrated to Chicago from across America to work and emerged as activists. From the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition to the 1934 Century of Progress Fair, American Indians in Chicago voiced their opinions about political, social, educational, and racial issues. City Indian focuses on the privileged members of the American Indian community in Chicago: doctors, nurses, business owners, teachers, and entertainers. During the Progressive Era more than any other time in the city's…
Rather than focusing on historical archives, this book is based on years of face-to-face research in and with urban Indigenous communities. Deftly describing the urban politics of identity, Jacobs provides insights into the ways in which Indigenous people manage senses of self and community in the twenty-first-century city.
Contemporary accounts of urban Native identity in two pan-Indian communities
In the last half century, changing racial and cultural dynamics in the United States have caused an explosion in the number of people claiming to be American Indian, from just over half a million in 1960 to over three million in 2013. Additionally, seven out of ten American Indians live in or near cities, rather than in tribal communities, and that number is growing.
In Indigenous Memory, Urban Reality, Michelle Jacobs examines the new reality of the American Indian urban experience. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted over two and a…
This edited collection of cutting-edge essays by scholars from across North America captures the profound diversity of Indigenous urban experience.
Ranging from Indigenous cities that existed prior to European arrival through the colonial period to the recent past, this anthology explodes the notion that Indigenous and urban histories have little to do with each other.
From ancient metropolises like Pueblo Bonito and TenochtitlAn to the twenty-first century Oceti Sakowin encampment of NoDAPL water protectors, Native people have built and lived in cities-a fact little noted in either urban or Indigenous histories. By foregrounding Indigenous peoples as city makers and city dwellers, as agents and subjects of urbanization, the essays in this volume simultaneously highlight the impact of Indigenous people on urban places and the effects of urbanism on Indigenous people and politics.
The authors-Native and non-Native, anthropologists and geographers as well as historians-use the term "Indian cities" to represent collective urban spaces established and regulated…
A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Orange’s novel is set in Indigenous Oakland and follows powwow dancers as they navigate identity, community, and loss. Widely praised for its articulation of today’s urban Indigenous experience, this work is fiction yet captures the realities that have emerged from longer histories.
** Shortlisted for the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award **
One of Barack Obama's best books of 2018, the New York Times bestselling novel about contemporary America from a bold new Native American voice
'A thunderclap' Marlon James 'Astonishing' Margaret Atwood, via Twitter 'Pure soaring beauty' Colm Toibin
Jacquie Red Feather is newly sober and hoping to reconnect with her estranged family. That's why she is there. Dene is there because he has been collecting stories to honour his uncle's death, while Edwin is looking for his true father and Opal came to watch her boy Orvil dance.
Even the “centre” of empire has an Indigenous history. Indigenous London offers a vision of the city's past from a new perspective: that of Indigenous children, women, and men who traveled there, willingly or otherwise, from territories that became Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States. Some, like the Powhatan noblewoman Pocahontas, are familiar; others, like an Odawa boy held as a prisoner of war in the eighteenth century, have almost been lost to history. Indigenous London illustrates how the city learned to be an imperial place and how Indigenous people were central to that process. Including poems built from archival fragments and self-guided tours of Indigenous sites across the city, Indigenous London offers an illuminating perspective on one of the world’s great cities.
On the run from her abusive husband, Kyra Smith hits the road. Destination unknown. With a dog she rescued in tow, she lands in the peaceful California mountain town of Gold Creek and is immediately befriended by an openhearted group of women who call themselves the Tattooed Ladies. They’re there for Kyra—and for each other.
The maternal Frannie is a tattoo artist struggling with a troubled daughter. Suzy is a self-described fashionista grandma bearing a painful estrangement from her son. Then there’s Jo, whose storybook marriage is shadowed by a grim medical diagnosis. And bookstore owner Marisol. She longs for…
A woman escaping a violent past finds new friendships, romance, and tenuous sanctuary in an emotionally gripping novel by New York Times bestselling author Eileen Goudge.
On the run from her abusive husband, Kyra Smith hits the road. Destination unknown. With a neglected dog she rescued in tow, she lands in the peaceful California town of Gold Creek and is immediately befriended by an openhearted group of women called the Tattooed Ladies Club. They're there for Kyra-and for each other.
The maternal Frannie is a tattoo artist struggling with a troubled daughter. Suzy is a self-described fashionista grandma bearing a…
