Contemporary accounts of urban Native identity in two pan-Indian communities In the last half century, changing racial and cultural dynamics in the United States have caused an explosion in the number of people claiming to be American Indian, from just over half a million in 1960 to over three million in 2013. Additionally, seven out of ten American Indians live in or near cities, rather than in tribal communities, and that number is growing. In Indigenous Memory, Urban Reality, Michelle Jacobs examines the new reality of the American Indian urban experience. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted over two and a half years, Jacobs focuses on how some individuals are invested in reclaiming Indigenous identities whereas others are more invested in relocating their sense of self to the urban environment. These groups not only apply different meanings to indigeneity, but they also develop different strategies for asserting and maintaining Native identities in an urban space inundated with false memories and fake icons of "Indian-ness." Jacobs shows that "Indianness" is a highly contested phenomenon among these two groups: some are accused of being "wannabes" who merely "play Indian," while others are accused of being exclusionary and "policing the boundaries of Indianness." Taken together, the interconnected stories of relocators and reclaimers expose the struggles of Indigenous and Indigenous-identified participants in urban pan-Indian communities. Indigenous Memory, Urban Reality offers a complicated portrait of who can rightfully claim and enact American Indian identities and what that tells us about how race is "made" today.
Michelle R. Jacobs is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Wayne State University.
"Through narration and sociological analyses, Jacobs offers the reader fascinating recounts of both Indigenous memories and urban realities for Native people living in Northeast Ohio. The American Indian population there has been shaped and reshaped-initially eradicated by white settlers, then revitalized by federal Indian relocation programs and Red Power Native rights activism, objectified by Major League Baseball, and challenged by COVID-19 pandemic. The voices in Jacobs' accessible and informative book speak to the importance of ancestry, spirituality, homelands, powwows, and organizations in contemporary Indigenous America which she shows in all of its complexity, contradictions, and community." * Joane Nagel, author of Gender and Climate Change: Impacts, Science, Policy *
