Author: Susan Lobo Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 9780742502758 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 340
Book Description
Modern American Indian life is urban, rural, and everything in-between. Lobo and Peters have compiled an unprecedented collection of innovative scholarship, stunning art, poetry, and prose that documents American Indian experiences of urban life. A pervasive rural/urban dichotomy still shapes the popular and scholarly perceptions of Native Americans, but this is a false expression of a complex and constantly changing reality. When viewed from the Native perspectives, our concepts of urbanity and approaches to American Indian studies are necessarily transformed. Courses in Native American studies, ethnic studies, anthropology, and urban studies must be in step with contemporary Indian realities, and American Indians and the Urban Experience will be an absolutely essential text for instructors. This powerful combination of path-breaking scholarship and visual and literary arts--from poetry and photography to rap and graffiti--will be enjoyed by students, scholars, and a general audience. A Choice Outstanding Academic Book.
Author: Susan Lobo Publisher: University of Arizona Press ISBN: 9780816513161 Category : Literary Collections Languages : en Pages : 164
Book Description
California has always been America's promised landÑfor American Indians as much as anyone. In the 1950s, Native people from all over the United States moved to the San Francisco Bay Area as part of the Bureau of Indian Affairs Relocation Program. Oakland was a major destination of this program, and once there, Indian people arriving from rural and reservation areas had to adjust to urban living. They did it by creating a cooperative, multi-tribal communityÑnot a geographic community, but rather a network of people linked by shared experiences and understandings. The Intertribal Friendship House in Oakland became a sanctuary during times of upheaval in people's lives and the heart of a vibrant American Indian community. As one long-time resident observes, "The Wednesday Night Dinner at the Friendship House was a must if you wanted to know what was happening among Native people." One of the oldest urban Indian organizations in the country, it continues to serve as a gathering place for newcomers as well as for the descendants of families who arrived half a century ago. This album of essays, photographs, stories, and art chronicles some of the people and events that have playedÑand continue to playÑa role in the lives of Native families in the Bay Area Indian community over the past seventy years. Based on years of work by more than ninety individuals who have participated in the Bay Area Indian community and assembled by the Community History Project at the Intertribal Friendship House, it traces the community's changes from before and during the relocation period through the building of community institutions. It then offers insight into American Indian activism of the 1960s and '70sÑincluding the occupation of AlcatrazÑand shows how the Indian community continues to be created and re-created for future generations. Together, these perspectives weave a richly textured portrait that offers an extraordinary inside view of American Indian urban life. Through oral histories, written pieces prepared especially for this book, graphic images, and even news clippings, Urban Voices collects a bundle of memories that hold deep and rich meaning for those who are a part of the Bay Area Indian communityÑaccounts that will be familiar to Indian people living in cities throughout the United States. And through this collection, non-Indians can gain a better understanding of Indian people in America today. "If anything this book is expressive of, it is the insistence that Native people will be who they are as Indians living in urban communities, Natives thriving as cultural people strong in Indian ethnicity, and Natives helping each other socially, spiritually, economically, and politically no matter what. I lived in the Bay Area in 1975-79 and 1986-87, and I was always struck by the Native (many people do say 'American Indian' emphatically!) community and its cultural identity that has always insisted on being second to none. Yes, indeed this book is a dynamic, living document and tribute to the Oakland Indian community as well as to the Bay Area Indian community as a whole." ÑSimon J. Ortiz "When my family arrived in San Francisco in 1957, the people at the original San Francisco Indian Center helped us adjust to urban living. Many years later, I moved to Oakland and the Intertribal Friendship House became my sanctuary during a tumultuous time in my life. The Intertribal Friendship House was more than an organization. It was the heart of a vibrant tribal community. When we returned to our Oklahoma homelands twenty years later, we took incredible memories of the many people in the Bay Area who helped shape our values and beliefs, some of whom are included in this book." ÑWilma Mankiller, former Principal Chief, Cherokee Nation
Author: Kurt Peters Publisher: AltaMira Press ISBN: 0585386366 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 331
Book Description
Modern American Indian life is urban, rural, and everything in-between. Lobo and Peters have compiled an unprecedented collection of innovative scholarship, stunning art, poetry, and prose that documents American Indian experiences of urban life. A pervasive rural/urban dichotomy still shapes the popular and scholarly perceptions of Native Americans, but this is a false expression of a complex and constantly changing reality. When viewed from the Native perspectives, our concepts of urbanity and approaches to American Indian studies are necessarily transformed. Courses in Native American studies, ethnic studies, anthropology, and urban studies must be in step with contemporary Indian realities, and American Indians and the Urban Experience will be an absolutely essential text for instructors. This powerful combination of path-breaking scholarship and visual and literary arts—from poetry and photography to rap and graffiti—will be enjoyed by students, scholars, and a general audience. A Choice Outstanding Academic Book.
Author: Donald Lee Fixico Publisher: UNM Press ISBN: 9780826322166 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 276
Book Description
As the first ethnohistory of modern urban Indians, this perceptive study looks at Indians from many tribes living in cities throughout the United States. Fixico has had unparalleled access to Native Americans, particularly their contemporary oral tradition. Through firsthand observations, interviews, and conventional historical sources, he has been able to assess the major impact urbanization has had on Indians and see how they have come to terms with both the negative and enriching aspects of living in cities. The result is an insightful and empathetic account of how Indian identity is sustained in cities. Today two-thirds of all Indians live in cities. Many of these urban Indians are third- or fourth-generation city dwellers, the descendants of those who first came to urban areas during the federal government's push for relocation from the late 1940s through the 1960s. Fixico looks at both groups of urban Native Americans--those who first settled in cities some fifty years ago and those who have grown up there in the past thirty years--and finds in their experiences a record of survival and adaptation. Fixico offers a new view of urban Indians, one centered on questions of how their modern identity emerges and perseveres. He shows how the corrosive effects of cultural alienation, alcoholism, poor health services, unemployment, and ghetto housing are slowly being overcome, particularly since the 1970s. After fifty years of urban experiences, Native Americans living in cities are better able today than at any other time to balance tradition and modernity.
Author: Douglas K. Miller Publisher: UNC Press Books ISBN: 1469651394 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 273
Book Description
In 1972, the Bureau of Indian Affairs terminated its twenty-year-old Voluntary Relocation Program, which encouraged the mass migration of roughly 100,000 Native American people from rural to urban areas. At the time the program ended, many groups--from government leaders to Red Power activists--had already classified it as a failure, and scholars have subsequently positioned the program as evidence of America's enduring settler-colonial project. But Douglas K. Miller here argues that a richer story should be told--one that recognizes Indigenous mobility in terms of its benefits and not merely its costs. In their collective refusal to accept marginality and destitution on reservations, Native Americans used the urban relocation program to take greater control of their socioeconomic circumstances. Indigenous migrants also used the financial, educational, and cultural resources they found in cities to feed new expressions of Indigenous sovereignty both off and on the reservation. The dynamic histories of everyday people at the heart of this book shed new light on the adaptability of mobile Native American communities. In the end, this is a story of shared experience across tribal lines, through which Indigenous people incorporated urban life into their ideas for Indigenous futures.
Author: Lisa Charleyboy Publisher: ISBN: 9781554517503 Category : Juvenile Nonfiction Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Young, urban Natives share their diverse stories, shattering stereotypes and powerfully illustrating how Native culture and values can survive -- and enrich -- city life.
Author: Colin Calloway Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0197547656 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 289
Book Description
America's founding involved and required the melding of cultures and communities, a redefinition of 'frontier' and boundaries in every possible sense. Using the accounts of Native leaders who visited cities in the Early Republic, Calloway's book reorients the story of that founding. Violent resistance was just one of many Native responses to colonialism. Peaceful interaction was far more the norm, and while less dramatic and therefore less covered, far more important in its effects.
Author: Kent Blansett Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press ISBN: 0806190493 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 343
Book Description
From ancient metropolises like Pueblo Bonito and Tenochtitlán 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 by a range of institutions, organizations, churches, and businesses. These urban institutions have strengthened tribal and intertribal identities, creating new forms of shared experience and giving rise to new practices of Indigeneity. Some of the essays in this volume explore Native participation in everyday economic activities, whether in the commerce of colonial Charleston or in the early development of New Orleans. Others show how Native Americans became entwined in the symbolism associated with Niagara Falls and Washington, D.C., with dramatically different consequences for Native and non-Native perspectives. Still others describe the roles local Indigenous community groups have played in building urban Native American communities, from Dallas to Winnipeg. All the contributions to this volume show how, from colonial times to the present day, Indigenous people have shaped and been shaped by urban spaces. Collectively they demonstrate that urban history and Indigenous history are incomplete without each other.
Author: Edmund Jefferson Danziger, Jr. Publisher: Wayne State University Press ISBN: 0814343333 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 225
Book Description
Survival and Regeneration captures the heritage of Detroit's colorful Indian community through printed sources and the personal life stories of many Native Americans. Survival and Regeneration captures the heritage of Detroit's colorful Indian community through printed sources and the personal life stories of many Native Americans. During a ten-year period, Edmund Jefferson Danziger, Jr. interviewed hundreds of Indians about their past and their needs and aspirations for the future. This history is essentially their success story. In search of new opportunities, a growing number of rural Indians journeyed to Detroit after World War II. Destitute reservations had sapped their physical and cultural strength; paternalistic bureaucrats undermined their self-respect and confidence; and despairing tribal members too often sound solace in mind-numbing alcohol. Cut off from the Bureau of Indian Affairs services, many newcomers had difficulty establishing themselves successfully in the city and experienced feelings of insecurity and powerlessness. By 1970, they were one of the Motor City's most "invisible" minority groups, so mobile and dispersed throughout the metropolitan area that not even the Indian organizations knew where they all lived. To grasp the nature of their remarkable regeneration, this inspiring volume examines the historic challenges that Native American migrants to Detroit faced - adjusting to urban life, finding a good job and a decent place to live, securing quality medical care, educating their children, and maintaining their unique cultural heritage. Danziger scrutinizes the leadership that emerged within the Indian community and the formal native organizations through which the Indian community's wide-ranging needs have been met. He also highlights the significant progress enjoyed by Detroit Indians - improved housing, higher educational achievement, less unemployment, and greater average family incomes - that has resulted from their persistence and self-determination. Historically, the Motor City has provided an environment where lives could be refashioned amid abundant opportunities. Indians have not been totally assimilated, nor have they forsaken Detroit en masse for their former homelands. Instead, they have forged vibrant lives for themselves as Indian-Detroiters. They are not as numerous or politically powerful as their black neighbors, but the story of these native peoples leaves no doubt about their importance to Detroit and of the city's effect on them.
Author: Laura M. Furlan Publisher: U of Nebraska Press ISBN: 1496202740 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 353
Book Description
In Indigenous Cities Laura M. Furlan demonstrates that stories of the urban experience are essential to an understanding of modern Indigeneity. She situates Native identity among theories of diaspora, cosmopolitanism, and transnationalism by examining urban narratives—such as those written by Sherman Alexie, Janet Campbell Hale, Louise Erdrich, and Susan Power—along with the work of filmmakers and artists. In these stories Native peoples navigate new surroundings, find and reformulate community, and maintain and redefine Indian identity in the postrelocation era. These narratives illuminate the changing relationship between urban Indigenous peoples and their tribal nations and territories and the ways in which new cosmopolitan bonds both reshape and are interpreted by tribal identities. Though the majority of American Indigenous populations do not reside on reservations, these spaces regularly define discussions and literature about Native citizenship and identity. Meanwhile, conversations about the shift to urban settings often focus on elements of dispossession, subjectivity, and assimilation. Furlan takes a critical look at Indigenous fiction from the last three decades to present a new way of looking at urban experiences, one that explains mobility and relocation as a form of resistance. In these stories Indian bodies are not bound by state-imposed borders or confined to Indian Country as it is traditionally conceived. Furlan demonstrates that cities have always been Indian land and Indigenous peoples have always been cosmopolitan and urban.
Author: Susan Lobo
Author: Susan Lobo
Author: Kurt Peters
Author: Donald Lee Fixico
Author: Douglas K. Miller
Author: Lisa Charleyboy
Author: Colin Calloway
Author: Kent Blansett
Author: Edmund Jefferson Danziger, Jr.
Author: Laura M. Furlan