Indigenous cities : urban Indian fiction and the histories of relocation / Laura M. Furlan.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

In Indigenous Cities Laura M. Furlan demonstrates that stories of the urban experience are essential to an understanding of modern Indigeneity. She situates Native identity among theories of diaspora, cosmopolitanism, and transnationalism by examining urban narratives--such as those written by Sherman Alexie, Janet Campbell Hale, Louise Erdrich, and Susan Power--along with the work of filmmakers and artists. In these stories Native peoples navigate new surroundings, find and reformulate community, and maintain and redefine Indian identity in the postrelocation era. These narratives illuminate the changing relationship between urban Indigenous peoples and their tribal nations and territories and the ways in which new cosmopolitan bonds both reshape and are interpreted by tribal identities.

Though the majority of American Indigenous populations do not reside on reservations, these spaces regularly define discussions and literature about Native citizenship and identity. Meanwhile, conversations about the shift to urban settings often focus on elements of dispossession, subjectivity, and assimilation. Furlan takes a critical look at Indigenous fiction from the last three decades to present a new way of looking at urban experiences, one that explains mobility and relocation as a form of resistance. In these stories Indian bodies are not bound by state-imposed borders or confined to Indian Country as it is traditionally conceived. Furlan demonstrates that cities have always been Indian land and Indigenous peoples have always been cosmopolitan and urban.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

In her lucid exploration of the historical contexts and central tropes of contemporary urban Indian fiction, Furlan (Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst) argues for a reconception of Indigenous Americans' identities and their need and ability to reconfigure concepts such as tribe, community, relationship to "the land," and spirituality. Through close reading of authors Sherman Alexie, Janet Campbell Hale, Louise Erdrich, and Susan Power--along with briefer comparisons with numerous other writers, artists, and filmmakers--Furlan presents Indigenous peoples not as dispossessed and dysfunctional victims of colonization but as resilient, resistant survivors shaping new possibilities for themselves. Furlan's analyses show that too-easy assumptions of mainstream versus Indian ways of being--i.e., urban versus reservation-bound, modern versus primitive--cannot stand once one sees that Indians have always been more multivalent than familiar concepts acknowledge. In earlier Indigenous fiction, the urban has been a negative site; Furlan shows that to be an oversimplification. The encouraged relocation of Indians to urban settings intensified social pressures and brought economic opportunities--and intensified evolution of Indigenous identity toward a broader "intertribal" frame. This "new" identity is less new than a building on the resilience that has always been a key element of Native life. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --Michael F. McClure, Virginia State University