Indian Cities: Histories of Indigenous Urbanism

Indian Cities: Histories of Indigenous Urbanization, published by University of Oklahoma Press in 2022 and co-edited by Kent Blansett, Cathleen D. Cahill, and Andrew Needham.

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.

Maurice Crandall (Dartmouth College), Jennifer Denetdale (University of New Mexico), C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa (George Mason University), Mishuana R. Goeman (UCLA), Nathaniel Holly (William & Mary), David Hugill (Carleton University), Ari Kelman (UC-Davis), Douglas Miller (Oklahoma State University), Elaine Nelson (University of Nebraska-Omaha), Dana E. Powell (Appalachian State University), Sasha Suarez (University of Minnesota), and Daniel Usner (Vanderbilt University) along with co-conveners Kent Blansett (University of Nebraska-Omaha), Cathleen Cahill (Pennsylvania State University) and Andrew Needham (New York University)..

The symposium occurred in two stages and in two places. The first meeting was in September 2018 at SMU’s campus in Taos, NM, where there was a private workshop for participants. The scholars then gathered to workshop again and held a public symposium at New York University in the spring of 2019. Each Clements Center symposium follows a similar model and each has resulted in a book published by a prominent academic press.