The Urban Politics of Settler-Colonialism: Articulations of the Colonial Relation in Postwar Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1945-1975 (AND BEYOND)

This dissertation documents some of the ways that colonial practices and mentalities have shaped relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in the historical and material conjuncture of Minneapolis, Minnesota, with a focus on the period 1945 to 1975. Building on political and geographical literature concerned with the enduring effects of settler-colonization in North American urban environments, my inquiry starts from the premise that the “colonial relation” retains a persistent structural trace in Minneapolis, manifesting through a series of practices and dynamics that operate to enforce particular forms of social, economic, and territorial domination. I begin by demonstrating that Indigenous peoples in the area were territorially and economically displaced in the construction of the newcomer settlement that became Minneapolis, which I describe by looking critically at the life of one of the city’s early “city builders,” Thomas Barlow Walker. I then expand this discussion by developing a series of arguments that demonstrate how the “colonial relation” has articulated in the Phillips neighborhood of South Minneapolis, which, for a variety of reasons, emerged as a site of significant Indigenous residential concentration and congregation in the aftermath of the Second World War. In particular, I consider how colonial practices and mentalities hastened Indigenous migration to the inner-city, constrained the knowledge practices of non-Indigenous advocacy organizations interested in alleviating urban forms of Indigenous marginalization, and shaped a culture of inner-city “racialized policing.” I then conclude with a brief and speculative look at the colonial relation in present-day Minneapolis, examining some of the ways that both Indigenous marginality and economic prosperity are bound up with broader deployments of state violence, particularly through the activities of local weapons manufacturers. Throughout, I argue that to make sense of the distinct patterns of group differentiated insecurity that disproportionately plagued Indigenous migrants to Minneapolis in the postwar period and the decades that followed, we need to think beyond the immediacy of the present and pay close heed to the ways in which colonially-inflected legacies, material distributions, and knowledge practices continue to have distinct effects.

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