Dr. Rosalva Resendiz
"Native Americans have been relegated to history, while their contemporary stories of survival have been lost. Urban American Indians: Reclaiming Native Space brings to the forefront the struggles that the indigenous community faces today. This work is of utmost importance, as it disrupts the notions of who is a 'real' American Indian."
Donald L. Fixico (Shawnee
"From ancient Indian cities like Cahokia to urban Indian areas in the 21st century, this book shows us how broadly indigenous peoples have lived in urban areas. All of America was once Native space, and this volume superbly demonstrates how Indians developed towns and cities with organized infrastructures of families and communities located strategically along water areas and trade routes. In fact, the majority of Indians live in urban areas today, not on reservations, why? This timely book makes us rethink what we know about American Indians and consider the idea that they built an urban Native America."
Amy Casselman
"Urban American Indians is an important new work that examines the central yet undertheorized experience of American Indian people in urban spaces. Challenging the notion of Native people as solely existing in the past or in the margins, this book carefully examines the spectrum of experiences within urban Native America. In doing so, it and encourages us to rethink Native identity both past and present as we look towards future generations."
Dr. Patty Loew (Bad River Ojibwe)
"In telling the stories of urban Native Americans, Donna Martinez, Grace Sage, and Azusa Ono remind us that indigenous peoples have a long and complicated relationship with cities. This important book chronicles their multi-faceted journey through invisibility, defiance, and adaptation towards a contemporary identity shaped by their own tribal traditions and experiences shared with other urban Indians."
Caskey Russell (Tlingit)
"Urban American Indians: Reclaiming Native Space is a major contribution to American Indian urban and diaspora studies and is destined to become a seminal text in this burgeoning field. Martinez, Sage, and Ono explode the myth that urbanization entails assimilation and cultural loss, and that away from reservations American Indians lose agency and identity. Rather, readers are forced to grapple with contemporary notions of American Indian identity and envision what Indigenous America will look like over the course of the 21st century. Urban American Indians is indeed the cutting edge of American Indian and Indigenous studies."
Sharon Carson
"A much needed addition to the scholarship and social history of American Indian urban experience, with an especially illuminating focus on emerging indigenous political geographies within American cities. The book also offers important and critical analysis of the impact of federal policy and law on urban American Indian communities, especially as such policies sparked the need for self-determined community organizing by these communities."
J. Michael Faragher
"This publication, which provides a timely analysis of the critical issues associated with the complex challenges facing Native Americans attempting to flourish in several different worlds, is long overdue. It should be required reading in any graduate or undergraduate program claiming currency in cultural sensitivity and awareness."
Megan Tusler
"Urban American Indians: Reclaiming Native Space works to produce an original narrative about the significance of American Indian urban history to the 20th and 21st centuries. Martinez's account of urbanism situates Indigenous identity as a conceptual problem that operates across spatial boundaries, showing how previous accounts of 'urban' and 'reservation' life don't engage fully enough with the shifting terrain of Indian belonging. In engaging with contemporary history and geography, Martinez, Sage, and Ono demonstrate the crucial significance of the study of urban Indian life to American history, Native history and epistemology, and urbanism."
Dr. Claudia J. Ford
"Urban American Indians: Reclaiming Native Space is a critical contribution to the literature on understanding and reclaiming the extended history of cultural and political structures of American Indian life on this continent."
Angelique EagleWoman (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate)
"This is a powerful collection that highlights the fundamental value and strength of tribal peoples living in community, whether urban or rural. From the historical to the contemporary, this book engages the truth of the real American Indian experience as occurring both in urban settings as well as in reservation homelands."
Professor Angelique EagleWoman (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate)
"This is a powerful collection that highlights the fundamental value and strength of tribal peoples living in community, whether urban or rural. From the historical to the contemporary, this book engages the truth of the real American Indian experience as occurring both in urban settings as well as in reservation homelands."
Kiara M. Vigil
"Shaped by research based on primary materials, community interviews and input, and secondary sources, Urban American Indians highlights the visibility of urban American Indians in histories of the United States and, importantly, showcases how their story is about cultural survival and resilience. Paying attention to the major impact that urbanization has had on American Indian communities this book illustrates both historical and contemporary facts concerning Indian activism in response to changes in federal Indian policy to broaden perspectives on both. This book succeeds in highlighting the centrality of urban American Indians' lived experiences pertaining to culture as well as politics to forever influence how readers will think of American Indian history, and for the better."
Timothy J. Johnson is a retired Senior Conciliation Specialist for the United States Department of J
"The authors of this book have given non-Indian readers a refreshing and informative look at the incredible reality of the fact that traditional cultures still exist even in our urban centers. The authors describe how a culture adapts versus assimilates. The authors explain what happened to the Indians who relocated to the cities, and the reactions to federal policies toward Indians that facilitated the growth of American Indian Activism. This is a book about the positive force of cultural identity, tradition, and human spirit."