Indian Cities: Histories of Indigenous Urbanization ed. by Kent Blansett, Cathleen D. Cahill, and Andrew Needham (review)

Reviewed by: Indian Cities: Histories of Indigenous Urbanization ed. by Kent Blansett, Cathleen D. Cahill, and Andrew Needham Nicolas G. Rosenthal (bio) Indian Cities: Histories of Indigenous Urbanization edited by Kent Blansett, Cathleen D. Cahill, and Andrew Needham University of Oklahoma Press, 2022 the twelve essays in this collection "highlight the work of Indigenous peoples in shaping urban places and the role that urban spaces play in shaping Indigenous communities and politics" (2). While they do not make a "methodological intervention," as the editors claim—this was done by the first wave of historical scholarship on Indigenous Peoples and urban areas, discussed at length in the introduction—they do offer "multiple perspectives on urban Indigeneity and experiences of city life across centuries" (2) and thereby make critical contributions to understanding the history of Indigenous Peoples and cities. Drawing upon recent theoretical frameworks, the essays also provide new language for conceptualizing urban Indigeneity within broader anticolonial narratives featuring Indigenous people as dynamic actors. Collectively, the authors work from the premise that settler colonialism has depended on the "deurbanization" of Indigenous people, including both Indigenous dispossession central to the development of metropolitan regions and "narratives of dislocation" that proclaim Indigeneity antithetical to urban areas. Indigenous survivance, in contrast, has included persistence within growing urban centers, active Indigenizing of urban spaces, and histories that affirm urban Indigeneity. That tension is present in the volume's first section, "Remaking Urban Spaces in Early America," featuring Nathaniel Holly's essay on Cherokee laborers' regular use of seventeenth century Charlestown. Decentering the Anglo-Indigenous frontier, it argues the colonial British capital was "just another urban place in a world characterized by urban places," (26) where ordinary Cherokees challenged colonists seeking to exploit Indigenous labor. Similar themes of Indigenous presence run through Daniel H. Usner's contribution on early New Orleans, addressing how local Indigenous people "regularly turned the formative colonial town into their own ritual space" (51) through performances associated with diplomacy and trade, thus forging a civic culture used to negotiate relationships with French officials. Part Two, "Imperial Cities and Dispossession in the Nineteenth Century," emphasizes that settler colonialism and urbanization were closely linked [End Page 146] during a period of rapid industrialization. This includes Ari Kelman's essay on how the urbanization of Minnesota facilitated violence against Indigenous populations, culminating with the 1862 execution of thirty-eight Dakota men in Makato; Mishuana R. Goeman's piece exploring the ways settler fictions and urban electrification functioned to dispossess Native people and create Niagara Falls as a tourist site reinforcing heteronormative gender relations; C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa's examination of how the cultural landscape of Washington, D.C. depicted the specter of Indigenous violence while narrating its pacification; and Maurice Crandall's history of Yavapai-Apache persistence in what became Arizona's Verde Valley. Genetin-Pilawa includes suggestions of how Native people nonetheless made the U.S. capital a "Native city," while survivance is a more defining theme for Crandall in understanding Yavapai-Apache adaptations to the urbanization of their homelands. The chapters that make up Part Three, "Building Community in Twentieth-Century Indian Cities," cover themes most established in the scholarship on Indigenous Peoples and cities. Sasha Maria Suarez's contribution on Minneapolis and David Hugill's study of Winnipeg focus on social service organizations and community development. Douglas K. Miller works to think more broadly about Dallas as a place that has been important to Indigenous people but does not strictly define their experience nor contain their more expansive identities. Elaine Marie Nelson's essay examines the use of urban spaces, with the example of Rapid City, as a center of intertribal coalition building and broader resistance, such as challenging the tourist stories laying claim to the Black Hills. Together, the essays in this section illustrate the depth and range of urban Indigeneity, further making the case for it as a constitutive feature of modern society. Dana E. Powell's contribution addressing the NoDAPL encampments and Jennifer Denetdale on COVID-19 and Diné peoples make up the last section of the volume, "Indigenous Urban Futures in the Twenty-First Century." Powell frames the 2016–17 encampments formed to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline as...

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