Today a majority of Indigenous peoples live in urban areas: they are builders and cleaners, teachers and lawyers, market women and masons, living in towns and cities surrounded by the people and pollution that characterize life for most individuals in the twenty-first century. Despite this basic fact, the vast majority of studies on Indigenous peoples concentrate solely on rural Indigenous populations.
Aiming to highlight these often-overlooked communities, Urban Indigeneities: Being Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century edited by Dana Brablec and Andrew Canessa is the first book to look at urban Indigenous peoples globally and present the urban Indigenous experience—not as the exception but as the norm. The contributing essays draw on a wide range of disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, architecture, land economy, and area studies, and are written by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars. The analysis looks at Indigenous people across the world and draws on examples not usually considered within the study of indigeneity, such as Fiji, Japan, and Russia.
Indigeneity is often seen as being “authentic” when it is practiced in remote rural areas, but these essays show that a vigorous, vibrant, and meaningful indigeneity can be created in urban spaces too. The book challenges many of the imaginaries and tropes of what constitutes “the Indigenous” and offers perspectives and tools to understand a contemporary Indigenous urban reality. As such, it is a must-read for anyone interested in the real lives of Indigenous people today. Read an excerpt from the book below.
We are all familiar with the image of the Indigenous person in forests or mountains living close to and in harmony with the natural environment, enjoying a traditional lifestyle distant from the realities of a modern world. The reality is that an increasing proportion of Indigenous peoples today live in urban areas (UN Habitat 2010). They are builders and cleaners, teachers and lawyers, market women and masons, living in towns and cities surrounded by the people and pollution that characterize life for most of us in the twenty first century.
Despite this basic reality of contemporary Indigenous life, the vast majority of studies on Indigenous peoples still concentrate on the rural Indigenous. There are a number of reasons for this. Even though Indigenous peoples have lived in cities for centuries and even created some of the largest cities of their era (e.g., Cuzco in Peru, and Tenochtitlan in Mexico), from the time of Rousseau, Hobbes, and Locke, Europeans and their descendants have seen Indigenous peoples as living in a “state of nature” and so were not only blind to an Indigenous history in cities, but even when they did appear in urban spaces, they were considered to be no longer Indigenous by definition. This close association of indigeneity with the wild spaces continues right through to the twenty-first century, where the “authentic” Indigenous subject is deemed to live in the forests and mountains far from urban life and, if not in a state of nature, certainly in harmony with it. To situate so resolutely the Indigenous beyond the urban is not only to ignore history but also to deprive Indigenous peoples of their cultural agency and their ability to create identities in any space they choose. The social sciences in general have been largely complicit in this, although there are some notable exceptions (Howard and Proulx 2011; Furlan 2017; Horn 2019). This book, written by Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors, is the first to look at urban Indigenous peoples globally and to present the urban Indigenous experience not as the exception, but as the norm it is.
Contributors
Aiko Ikemura Amaral
Chris Andersen
Giuliana Borea
Dana Brablec
Andrew Canessa
Sandra del Valle Casals
Stanislav Saas Ksenofontov
Daniela Peluso
Andrey Petrov
Marya Rozanova-Smith
Kate Stevens
Kanako Uzawa