THE CITIES WE CALL HOME: Indigeneity, Race andSettler‐ColonialUrbanisms

Abstract

The connection between Indigeneity and urban spaces remains on the margins of urban studies and Indigenous studies, even as the majority of Indigenous people in the United States live in cities. Scholars have recently begun to think about the connection between settler colonialism and racial capitalism and the urban. In this essay I examine how the dispossession of Indigenous peoples has shaped modern urban development and, importantly, how Indigenous peoples and culture have contributed to reclaiming and challenging urban dispossession through their engagement with Black people and culture. In this essay I use a few examples of Indigenous expressive culture in Detroit, Michigan, during the Emergency Management Era and urban Indigenous youth activism, to urge for us to move beyond simply demonstrating that Indigenous peoples live in urban contexts. Instead, I call for an urban Indigenous studies that explores the connections between dispossession and the possibilities of a radical Indigenous resurgence in cities, and describe how this can be done through solidarity with African Americans in a predominantly Black city.

The inheritance and repetition of colonial practices of dispossession

“…The analysis below draws on the above theoretical framings to make connections “between past processes” of colonisation and the “persistence of the logics of dispossession” (Mays, 2023: 158), in urban redevelopment in Sydney. Specifically, it examines how distinct modes of power have been mobilised across time in different colonial agendas.…”

Toward Just and Sustainable Futures: Human Learning and Relationality Within Socio-Ecological Systems

“…It is an ideology of supremacy that has claimed a "view from nowhere" (or zero-point epistemology; Mignolo, 2007) while functioning in service of inferiorizing and eradicating knowledge systems, languages, cultural practices, worldviews, and possibilities for learning and development, particularly those that challenge capitalist, colonial, and patriarchal systems and relations as inevitable or desirable (Dinerstein, 2016;Tejeda & Zavala, 2018). The violence enacted on Black, Indigenous, and non-Western communities across the globe through settler colonialism, enslavement, imperialism, and forced educational dispossession and assimilation and the ways communities have persistently worked to sustain self-determination and the dignity of their children even in the harshest conditions cannot be overstated here (Anderson, 2010;Bang & Brayboy, 2021;Espinoza & Vossoughi, 2014;Mays, 2023;Newland, 2022). Working to transform the systemic ways such paradigms have shaped our fields-as well as the terms of change-making-therefore requires understanding them as overt political projects with deep socio-ecological implications.…”

Indigenous Urbanisms

“…Finally, Mays (2023, this issue) explores the under‐examined links between Blackness and Indigeneity, and how this connection can foster critical forms of resistance to urban dispossession. Mays focuses on the city of Detroit to show how Indigenous peoples reclaim urban space through expressive culture and solidarity with African Americans, thus challenging the Indigenous/settler binary that often ignores other racialized non‐white people.…”