Passport
Learn more about ‘American Indians and the American Dream’ with this ‘University Place’ Q&A and episode
November 18, 2024 Leave a Comment
The American dream for many of us has come to mean home ownership in the suburbs, but what has that American dream come to mean for the First Americans?
In this episode of University Place Presents, host Norman Gilliland and his guest Kasey Keeler, assistant professor of American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, discuss the topic, American Indians and the American Dream, which she explores in her book of the same title.
Norman Gilliland: Growing up in Coon Rapids, Minnesota, what sort of sense of American Indian culture did you have while being grounded there?
Kasey Keeler: My communities, the Tuolumne Me-Wuk and Citizen Potawatomi, are not indigenous to the present-day state of Minnesota. When I grew up, the histories that I learned were of the Dakota and the Ojibwe peoples, whose homelands are in present-day Minnesota. So those are histories that I learned, oftentimes much more than my own, because it was where I lived, it was what I was surrounded with.
So when we think about present-day Minnesota, the Ojibwe are generally thought of as being in the northern part of the state. There are seven Ojibwe reservations in present-day Minnesota, and then the Dakota in the southern half of the state, where there are four Dakota communities.
Gilliland: So as a Native American, a designation that covers a lot of territory in both senses of the word, you might belong to one or more very specific tribes.
But then in a general sense, what kind of thing would you share with Native Americans in general that would make you, in a sense a guest, but on the other hand also someone who belongs in a certain place?
Keeler: Today, we’re using the term American Indian, it’s in the title of my book, but we often hear the term Native American.
And I like to talk about American Indian in the sense that it is a political designation. It’s also a legal designation that we have seen coming from the federal government as well.
So we need to always remember that there are 574 federally-recognized, distinct tribal nations across the United States today that have legal, political relationships with the federal government.
Collectively, we are often referred to as American Indian or Native American because of the similarities and those legal, political relationships, but very distinct in terms of being sovereign entities.
Gilliland: If we look at the rural settings for American Indians, not necessarily the reservations, but areas that might be near the reservations, we see a certain cultural profile.
I mean, it’s identifiable that these people are all of a certain tribe perhaps, but when they’re in the suburbs, is there that same kind of cohesiveness, or are they just scattered about and almost anonymous?
Keeler: When we think about American Indian people in more rural areas that are in closer proximity to tribal reservations, we know that they generally identify with those tribes that they are in proximity of, right?
So in northern Wisconsin, we would see more people that identify as Ojibwe. In suburban areas, we know that there is greater diversity of the tribal nations where people come from.
In the case of my book, I look at the Twin Cities, the suburbs of Minneapolis in particular, and through census data, we know that American Indian people who live in the Twin Cities come from a wide range of tribal backgrounds. There are lots of Ojibwe and Dakota people whose homelands are Minnesota, but there are Indigenous peoples from Alaska, from the southwest, from California, from Oklahoma, really from all over the United States, including Indigenous peoples of the U.S. territories.
Gilliland: It’s pretty clear that there has not been much or any continuous habitation of the suburbs by Native Americans, that this is a fairly recent phenomenon.
Keeler: Thinking about your question of, ‘Who’s living in the suburbs as Indigenous peoples?’ we also need to be cognizant of the intentional effort of the federal government to exclude American Indian people from suburbs as well.
Gilliland: I think that, too, is a story that hasn’t been told. I mean, we’re fairly familiar with the concept of redlining, so that one ethnic group or another who would not be offered or sold housing in a certain sector of a city, we’re certainly not familiar with that in terms of Native Americans.
Keeler: Exclusionary housing policies are one way that American Indian people were excluded from suburban areas, whether it be redlining or race-based covenants. But I look even further back and think about the Indian wars in particular.
So in the case of Minnesota, the U.S.-Dakota War, in which Dakota people were forcibly exiled, and very violently so, from the state of Minnesota after the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, and they were forced out of the state and there was a bounty put on the heads of the scalps of Dakota people.
And, that same year, the U.S. Homestead Act became law, and that same land that Dakota people were forced off of became open for settlement for non-Natives. So those kinds of policies of the 19th century kind of shepherded the policies that we see of the 20th century as well.
Gilliland: At what point do we see American Indians actually able to buy property in places that ordinarily, or that previously would’ve been forbidden?
Keeler: American Indian people were absolutely accessing the suburbs in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, but they were often doing so by pushing the limits on, like, what is a suburb, right? How far out of the city limit?
So these were places that may have been much more rural in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s, but today are definitely suburbs. And, we also know that American Indian people were kind of passing as white, not drawing attention to themselves because home ownership has also been a tool of assimilation, and you’re able to access certain properties and certain geographies by conforming to this Euro-American standard.
Gilliland: As far as moving into the suburbs by Native Americans, do we see any kind of, like, group effort to move into the suburbs, or is this just individual cases just scattered that wouldn’t even be aware of each other?
Keeler: I would say that it was pretty individual. There have not been large efforts of multiple groups of families to move to individual suburbs together. But, what we did see in the late 1970s is collectively American Indians coming together in multiple urban areas across the United States and working to access housing that way.
Gilliland: I also have to ask a question about the effect that casinos have had on suburban home ownership.
Keeler: By far, most tribal nations who engage in tribal gaming through casinos break even. They make enough profit to pay the employees who work there. Very few tribal nations that engage in tribal gaming generate enough revenue to do these per capita payments, where we have this idea of rich Indians.
So, those tribal nations who engage and break even in terms of paying their employees, many times, these employees are American Indians. It’s a way to provide support for their citizenry.
But, we also know a lot of employees at tribal gaming facilities are non-Native. So it’s often just good for economic development in general. But where we see tribal gaming being very successful, I would say absolutely it has encouraged and supported American Indian people accessing housing and home ownership where they may not have been able to otherwise.
Learn more from University Place and enjoy the full interview with Norman Gilliland and Kasey Keeler by watching American Indians and the American Dream anytime at pbswisconsin.org or wherever you stream TV on the free PBS app.
