American Indians and the American Dream

[gentle music] – Welcome to University Place Presents.

I’m Norman Gilliland.

The American dream for many of us, it has come to mean home ownership in a safe and prosperous place such as the suburbs.

But what has that American dream come to mean for the First Americans?

My guest is Kasey Keeler, Professor of American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the UW-Madison, and author of the book American Indians and the American Dream, published in 2023 by the University of Minnesota Press.

Welcome to University Place Presents.

– Thank you for having me.

I look forward to being here today.

– Let’s first get into your origins a little bit, and that will give us some idea of your point of view on the things that we’ll be talking about.

– Yeah, so the book, American Indians and the American Dream is really an autoethnography, meaning that its formation and the way it took shape and unfolded is really a self-reflection on my own origins or upbringing and how my own family accessed suburbanization and home ownership in particular.

So I grew up… Well, I should backtrack a little bit.

I was born in southeastern Oklahoma in Hugo, Oklahoma in the early 1980s.

And from there, my family came to Minnesota.

And we were renters in the 1980s.

It was my mom, my dad, my sister and I.

And of course, my family, my parents in particular had the goal of becoming homeowners in that timeframe.

So my parents rented for a while and then were able to access home ownership by the late 1980s in a suburb north of Minneapolis along the Mississippi River called Coon Rapids.

And that’s where I was raised from about kindergarten through 12th grade.

– Coming from Oklahoma though originally?

– Yes.

– Sometimes earlier known as Indian Territory.

– Yes.

– And what was the environment there?

– Yeah, so the place where we lived in Hugo, Oklahoma was very rural, small southern community.

And I have few memories because I was so young living there.

But interestingly, I had the first opportunity to return to Oklahoma earlier this spring in April.

I returned to Oklahoma to Tahlequah to give a keynote address.

And it was the first time I had been to Oklahoma in 20 years, almost to the day.

And you know, with so much history having evolved in those 20 years, I really returned and did a lot of self-reflection about the history of Oklahoma as Indian Territory.

What does it mean that my grandma grew up in Oklahoma, that I was born in Oklahoma?

How did my family end up in Oklahoma as Native people in the first place?

And thinking about histories of removal, American Indian removal.

My grandmother was Potawatomi, and her community, they were removed from the southern shores of Lake Michigan and forced into Indian Territory, present-day Oklahoma.

So knowing that history so much more well as an adult, as a professor, as a scholar, I really took that time when I returned to Oklahoma in April to think about that history.

And me almost returning to a home, though it’s not a place I have lived in quite some time.

– Would your parents have had some ancestral connection to, I mean, Potawatomi, Michigan, not Wisconsin, not Minnesota.

But would they have a sense of homecoming nonetheless, coming from Oklahoma?

– Yeah, that’s something that I think about too is homelands and Indigenous peoples’ connection to place, even if they haven’t lived there.

So as I mentioned, my grandma’s Potawatomi from the southern shores of Lake Michigan area, so more on the side of present-day Michigan, Indiana, before being removed to Indian Territory.

But my grandfather was Tuolumne Me-Wuk in California, and that’s where my mom was born and raised as well.

So I think about these places and these communities, Potawatomi, Tuolumne Me-Wuk, and places that I have never lived and likely never will, but here I am now today in Madison in Ho-Chunk homelands, and being a visitor in Ho-Chunk homelands, even as a Native woman.

So I think about that a lot in my own scholarship is connection to place, owning property in place, being a homeowner here in Madison.

And what does that mean when Ho-Chunk people might not have access to this land either?

– And home ownership or the very concept of ownership is something that has been said, in quite blunt terms, historically by European Americans to be something that Native Americans didn’t really have a concept of land ownership.

– Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

– A generalization at best.

– Right, so these notions of property that many of us have today are very European, Euro-American in nature.

Thinking that we can individually own distinct parcels of property is not an Indigenous concept, where there is more of a collective or shared stewardship of the land, a relationship with the land, versus thinking about land as property and something to be owned and consumed.

– But tribal boundaries nonetheless?

– Yeah, tribal boundaries.

You know, depending on the timeframe or year that you’re looking at, you can always find online a wealth of different maps that show tribal boundaries, and those boundaries were always in a constant state of flux and shifting, depending on intertribal relations between tribes that bordered each other that had to do with resources, whether it be the fur trade or fishing or hunting and seasonal rounds.

Those borders were always kind of in a constant state of flux.

– Growing up in Coon Rapids, Minnesota, what sort of sense did you have of being grounded there?

– Right, so my communities, the Tuolumne Me-Wuk and Citizen Potawatomi are not indigenous to the present-day state of Minnesota.

So 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 today, the Ojibwe are generally thought of as being in the northern part of the state.

There’s seven Ojibwe reservations in present-day Minnesota, and then the Dakota in the southern half of the state, where there’s four Dakota communities.

– So as a Native American, a designation that covers a lot of territory in both senses of the word, you might belong to a, well, 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.

– Right, so, you know, 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.

– For an individual to be at least legally, in a federal sense, categorized as a Native American, is there a universal set of standards?

– No, but there are common standards.

So as sovereign nations, the federal government does leave it up to individual tribal nations to determine enrollment or citizenship criteria.

So often, we see that based in blood quantum, which people collectively agree is a colonial tool meant to diminish tribal citizenship.

Oftentimes we see blood quantum criteria benchmarked at one-quarter blood quantum of that specific tribe.

So we often see blood quantum.

In addition to blood quantum, we see an increasing number of tribes move away from that and towards descent.

So as long as you had a family member or an ancestor enrolled in a tribe on a certain tribal roll, if you can prove that descendancy, then tribes often allow descent enrollment that way.

– We have some pictures of children.

– Yeah.

– In suburban settings.

And I know that this is a really interesting, really the brunt of your book is this phenomenon of Native Americans in the suburbs, which is not something we ordinarily think of, so that we might be slightly familiar with, say, the Mohawks working upper levels of New York City in the building trades, or of course, all kinds of rural settings for Native Americans, but the suburbs, something else.

Again, what kind of phenomenon is that?

How recent is that?

And as we look at these pictures.

– Right, so two answers to that is that we have this binary where we assume that American Indian people either live on reservation or they live in densely-populated urban areas.

So urban Indians in Minneapolis, urban Indians in Chicago, urban Indians in the Bay Area, for example.

In reality, we know that 70%, over 70% of Native people live off reservation, and that those people don’t exclusively live in urban centers, right?

They live in metropolitan areas, they live in rural areas outside of reservation communities, but increasingly, those people that live off reservation are living in suburban areas.

So there’s that, and a lot of that comes out of the relocation program of the mid-20th century that intentionally moved American Indian people off reservation to urban areas.

And over time, American Indian people have moved out of those urban areas into more suburban communities.

– Norman: Along with everyone else.

– Right, along with everybody else.

But my argument is that we also need to think about contemporary suburbs as historically Indigenous places.

That the suburbs weren’t suddenly created in the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s or ’60s, and then somehow American Indian people arrived to them.

These landscape, these are landscapes that American Indian people have known well and intimately for centuries.

There may not have always been long-term encampments, Indigenous encampments in modern day, in contemporary suburbs or places that we recognize today as contemporary suburbs.

But these are landscapes that Indigenous peoples used for trade, for travel, for diplomatic relationships, et cetera.

– 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?

– Right, so when we think about American Indian people in more rural areas that are in closer proximity to tribal reservations, we know that they are, generally identify with those tribes that they are in proximity of, right?

So 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.

So 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.

So of course, 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.

– Well, let’s, before we get into maybe what might be called the kind of the trade-off for Native Americans living in the suburbs, let’s see how it all came to be as it is, because even from what you’re saying, Kasey, 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.

– Right, so 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.

– 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.

And in part, I suppose, because we just didn’t realize that there were that many Native Americans that would even be on the radar for that kind of thing.

– Right, so 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.

– That Dakota War of 1862 is famous in some not surprisingly dark ways, as culminating with the largest mass execution in this country ever.

– Right, right.

So the U.S.-Dakota War is not a history that is well-known.

It occurred simultaneously with the U.S. Civil War, which receives much more attention, and understandably so.

But the U.S.-Dakota War was a six-week war that unfolded across present-day southern Minnesota from late August through September.

And the result of that war was that Dakota women, children, and the elderly were forcibly interned at the military fort, Fort Snelling, located at the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers, Bdte, which is a sacred place for Dakota people, in the late fall of 1862 through the spring of 1863, and Dakota men were held in Mankato.

And those Dakota men would go on to be put on military trial for supposed war crimes.

Again, this is happening at the same time as the U.S. Civil War.

And these Dakota men were held on military charges of murder, rape of white women, for their involvement in the war.

And ultimately, 38 Dakota men were hanged in Mankato, Minnesota the day after Christmas of 1862.

And those orders of hanging were signed off on by President Abraham Lincoln.

And that remains the largest U.S. mass, the largest mass execution in U.S. history.

In the spring of 1863, the Dakota people who remained in Mankato, the men, and then the women, children, and elderly at Fort Snelling, they were put on steamboats and then shipped, literally shipped out of state on the Mississippi River to new reservations outside of the state.

So this land that we think of that was really at stake in the U.S.-Dakota War is again the same land that was open for white settlement following the U.S.-Dakota War through the U.S. Homestead Act.

– That’s the big picture, but you have in your book some almost surprising, touching stories about individuals that pertain to the fact that not all of those Dakota left Minnesota.

– Right.

There are well-documented accounts of Dakota people that were able to remain in the state of Minnesota through hiding or through their military service or through their allegiance to prominent white families in the state of Minnesota.

So we know that not every single Dakota person fled the state of Minnesota or was exiled from the state, and that some were able to remain, and that over time, more and more Dakota people came back to their homelands and built communities.

– Stories about Dakota families or women who actually assisted, saved some of the, the European Americans who were in peril in this conflict.

– And just like the U.S. Civil War dividing families, we saw the same thing happen in Minnesota with Dakota families, where we saw allegiance split between the Dakota community and those also aligning more with white settlers, right?

So a lot of families were split, and it is a very bitter history today as well.

– It happened in Wisconsin too with the Ho-Chunk, as well as in Minnesota that one way or the other, some of these Indians either didn’t leave as you mentioned, or some of them came back in, too.

And some of them passed for white or whatever required them to go back home.

– And I think through these stories of those that remained, we can also see the intimate connections of Indigenous peoples to particular places, either remaining in Minnesota or making their way back in this really volatile and violent situation as well.

– There is something that you refer to as the diaspora, though, the Dakota from Minnesota.

– Right.

So when the Dakota were forced out of Minnesota at the end of the U.S.-Dakota War, we also know many Dakota voluntarily fled the state.

I don’t know if voluntary is even the right word.

They fled the state due to the certainty of prosecution if they were to be found out.

So many Dakota people fled into present-day South Dakota, North Dakota, also up into Canada.

So there are Dakota communities all over North Dakota, South Dakota, and into Canada today.

Some of those communities have individual members who have tried to come back to Minnesota, or they have remained, but with family and ties to the state of Minnesota today.

– You also in your book mentioned certain, we’ll call them inflection points in, or turning points in the progress, the process of Native Americans returning to the land, or at least land that they can associate with, and in particularly the suburbs.

So the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, fairly isolated chronologically, but there were other things ongoing after that that seemed to have had an impact on this phenomenon of suburbanization.

– Yeah, so over time, we see increasing numbers of Dakota people in particular coming back to the present-day state of Minnesota, making their way to the confluence of the Minnesota, Mississippi Rivers, Bdte, as a homeland for Dakota people, but also them navigating federal policy in order to access land and home ownership in particular, in their homelands.

Which I think is a really, I don’t even want to call it a phenomenon, but again, really underscoring the significance of place to Indigenous peoples, and forcing us to think about what does it mean to be Indigenous to a particular geography and having access to that.

So in the case of my book, thinking about what does it mean to be a Dakota person and having access to today’s suburban communities.

– By the time we get into the early 20th century, let’s see, it’s 1920 that American Indians actually get citizenship?

– 1924.

– Yeah, so.

– So it’s just a hundred years ago.

– Mind-boggling isn’t it, that it took that long.

– Right.

– But with that citizenship, they have what advantages that they didn’t have before?

– So that’s almost hard to say because I think a lot of that citizenship occurs in technicality, it occurs on paper, but that doesn’t mean that American Indian people overnight were suddenly treated as full and equal citizens.

And we can see a lot of how they were treated through the housing and home ownership process in ways that they were continuously excluded despite their full citizenship.

– And of course, this would vary from place to place and a little bit from time to time.

But have you seen in specific covenants or other policies exclusions specific to Native Americans?

– Right.

So you know, you mentioned earlier, redlining.

So we know that American Indian people were also excluded in practices of redlining.

There was devaluation in neighborhoods that American Indian people were moving into.

But in cases of race-based exclusion, yes, absolutely American Indian people were excluded.

Oftentimes the language in race-based covenants was something like “all persons not of the Caucasian race.”

So basically anybody that is not white were excluded from certain neighborhoods.

In certain cases, we see the language of Negro persons being excluded.

There is a court case that talks about an American Indian man being excluded from housing, from his home on a race-based covenant.

And he was a Mohawk Indian who was also Black.

So that case reached the Supreme Court.

So race-based covenants was one way that American Indian people were kept out of certain communities.

And a lot of those race-based covenants, they did make exceptions for hired help to live in certain properties.

Minnesota, the suburbs of Minneapolis has a well-known example of Edina being one of these towns where there are quite a few examples of race-based covenants.

It’s known as a sundown town.

– Norman: Yes.

– Kasey: And Edina, I’ve gone and looked at their records at the Hennepin County Government Center and looked at individual covenants for the properties.

And you can see the language that was used.

And then I compared those records with the United States census, and was actually able to find at least one American Indian woman who lived in Edina in the 1930s and 1940s.

And indeed, she was a hired help for a white family in this country club district of Edina, where race-based covenants were very common.

– So the general concept of these sunset rules was, and they were in all kinds of parts of the country.

I mean, they had them in Maine too, for example, in places.

The concept was that, well, you could work there, but you couldn’t spend the night.

– Right.

– You couldn’t stay over.

– Right, or you could work for a family and then live in an outbuilding, not the main residence.

– So… At what point do we see Indians able actually to buy property in places that ordinarily, or that previously would’ve been forbidden?

– Right.

– By covenant.

– I think that we saw, 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 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, right, 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.

– Yeah, I mean, it’s kind of interesting because of course, we continue to read as the histories are written of, for example, the schools, the notorious boarding schools where Indian children were forced to assimilate.

And yet if you wanted to move into the suburbs, and I’m gathering the numbers are much smaller than we might have seen in those schools over the years.

If you wanted to assimilate into the suburbs, you would walk the walk and talk the talk.

And who could tell if you were Mediterranean or something else that just happened to have a certain complexion?

– Right, and also increasing rates of intermarriage where a spouse may be Native and the other spouse may be white, and the children then were mixed and perhaps fairer-skinned and able to much more likely to pass.

– Yes, and you do mention in the book, you have some graphs too, that compares suburban home ownership between mixed race and full blood.

– Kasey: Right, single-race American Indians.

– Norman: And there’s quite a difference.

– Kasey: Yes, yeah.

– Norman: As the mixed race have a much better chance of actually buying that home in the suburbs.

– Kasey: Right.

– Well, as we get past citizenship in the ’20s into say, The New Deal and FDR and some really significant legal and, I think, social changes in the country, what kind of inflection point do we see?

I mean, the birth of what, the FHA, is that coming at this point?

– So in 1934, we saw the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act, almost simultaneously with the creation of the Federal Housing Administration, the FHA.

And so I look at these two policies and their duality of when they’re occurring, and what they are meant to support in terms of American Indian autonomy and sovereignty.

And then FHA in terms of access to housing and home ownership for Americans broadly, of which American Indians are also Americans, right?

– So, this is an improvement?

– We would think so, but as we mentioned, as we previously discussed, we know that American Indian people were excluded from accessing certain properties and home ownership through policies like redlining, and also race-based covenants, which were really at a height in the 1930s and 1940s.

– That’s true; I guess as you get into the 1920s, certainly you start to see, you know, Ku Klux Klan on the rise and that kind of thing.

And so some limitations there, but did this trigger court cases?

– It did.

I wouldn’t say that American Indians were often always the focal point of those court cases.

The courts ultimately said that race-based covenants are not enforceable, but they were on the books, and you can’t… You can’t make somebody not be racist, right, even if the courts say that you’re not able to enforce certain policies.

So we know that they still operated, race-based covenants still operated.

People chose who they wanted to sell their home to, often based on race.

If there were multiple buyers inquiring, one was Native, one was not, we can assume that homes were often sold to the non-Native buyers.

– That would’ve been a harder thing, I think, to track, if there was a choice, but if you suddenly saw a pattern.

– Kasey: Right.

– What about the prices, though?

Native Americans, did they have, as they’re moving into the suburbs, presumably with jobs, would they have had the same income to support, to buy and support a house in the suburbs as others?

– Yeah, oftentimes they did.

So in the mid-20th century, we saw the American Indian Relocation Program, which worked to move American Indian people off reservation into urban areas.

And that’s kind of happening simultaneously with the G.I.

Bill as American Indian or as Americans are coming back, American Indian veterans are coming back from their military service during World War II.

We see them taking advantage of the G.I.

Bill and particularly the home ownership program of the G.I.

Bill.

And we know that American Indians who had the same qualifications, whether it be military service or jobs, did not always receive the same treatment when it came to accessing homes in the suburbs and home ownership.

– And would that be because these Native Americans returning would be in a part of the country where people were familiar with or had developed a certain animosity toward them?

I mean, in other words, if you have a Navajo moving into Boston, perhaps not as big an issue as if moving into Albuquerque.

– Right, so the way that the relocation program worked was that it identified initially ten urban areas across the country for American Indian people to move to directly from a reservation community.

So over time, there were defacto relocation destinations as well, including Minneapolis.

So oftentimes, it was a matter of proximity.

So the relocation destinations of Chicago and Minneapolis for example, saw a lot of American Indian people come to them from the Great Lakes regions, from areas of Wisconsin, northern Minnesota, et cetera.

Sometimes people from these same geographies would maybe go to California, to Los Angeles, to the Bay Area, but they often arrived to urban areas with only access to short-term housing and not long-term support, or no direct pathway to home ownership, which is what we saw with the G.I.

Bill.

So I think that was, like, the real discrepancy is that American Indians didn’t have the same access despite having the same military service or the same job qualifications.

– Access, including maybe a home loan?

– Yes, yes.

So American Indians who were eligible for the G.I.

Bill were oftentimes redirected to pursue the relocation program.

So again, just like very surface level, the G.I.

Bill home loan benefit was just that, direct access to a home, generally a new home and generally in a suburb.

Whereas the relocation program provided a one-way bus or a rail ticket to an urban area in short-term rental housing.

– Oh, that’s a lot– – And when I say short-term rental housing, I mean oftentimes a stipend for two weeks at a YMCA, right?

And we’re talking about American Indian veterans who had the same military service in World War II.

So part of it was that these officials, federal officials in charge of these programs may not have understood, but I think that is a little bit too benevolent.

We know that undergirding these decisions is racism, right?

So American Indian veterans were told, “Oh, no, “pursue relocation, the G.I.

Bill’s not for you.

Take advantage of this instead,” even though they were starkly different programs with very different objectives.

– 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?

– 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 we did see in the 1970s, 1960s, late 1960s, 1970s, is collectively, American Indians coming together in multiple urban areas across the United States and working to access housing that way.

So one example is Little Earth in Minneapolis, where there was a great need for affordable and culturally-relevant housing for American Indian people who had made their way to Minneapolis, oftentimes through the relocation program, but did not have access to long-term housing, whether that be rental housing or home ownership.

So we saw the creation of Little Earth, which remains the only American Indian preference, low-income housing complex in the United States today.

And that opened in 1973, largely as a result of American Indian activism, and the push for housing for American Indian people in the city.

– Is there such a thing as a planned community for Native Americans?

– Yeah.

– Is that what we would see?

– I mean, in many ways, it was a planned community with American Indian people having input in what Little Earth would offer in terms of the units available and who would have access to it, and also the leadership of Little Earth in the early years as well.

– You mentioned, let’s say culturally suitable planning for a place like Little Earth.

What did that include?

– Yeah, so the way I think about culturally-relevant housing are the services that the communities provide.

So access, or in close proximity to places that provide access to health care, for example, education for American Indian people.

That can include language revitalization, courses on culture and cultural teachings for youth, but also for adults, and different support services for elders as well.

– Well, that ties into a question I was mentioning earlier that we would get to, and that is in moving to the suburbs, now, Little Earth seems to be quite the exception where, there’s culture, not only preserved, but rejuvenated.

– Right.

– But for the great majority of these Native Americans moving into the suburbs from what might be called home territory, what are they giving up?

– Mm-hmm, like, what’s the trade-off?

– Yes, they’re totally assimilating into the white way of life.

– Right, well, I wouldn’t say they’re totally assimilating.

I would say many of them are working to retain their American Indian identity, but also navigating home ownership.

And what does it mean to move to a predominantly white suburb?

One way that a lot of American Indian people who have moved to the suburbs, I think are able to do that, are through really rich American Indian education programs, which exist at the K through 12 level.

So a lot of American Indian youth participate in these programs that are provided through the school district through federal funding.

So that’s one way.

But a lot of American Indians who live in suburbs today, and this has been the case, you know, over the last 50, 75 years when we’ve seen the growth of an American Indian population in suburbs, is that many also retain their ties to a tribal community.

So again, in the case of Minneapolis, Ojibwe communities, you know, are an hour, two hours, three hours north of the Twin Cities, and the Twin Cities really are home to Dakota communities.

And there’s multiple Dakota tribal communities within the Twin Cities themselves.

For example, the Shakopee Mdewakanton community right there in the Twin Cities and Prairie Island, maybe a half hour, 45 minutes outside of Minneapolis as well.

– Well, I realize as you’ve already said, Kasey, that obviously there’s a lot of mixing, just a lot of mixing in the American population in general, and that would include Native Americans.

But if you have an Ojibwe moving into a Potawatomi or some other tribal area, is there general acceptance?

– Yeah, we see a lot of intertribal relationships these days.

And I say relationships very broadly.

So intertribal relations are very common.

And we see the growth of places like Indian centers are very common across the United States at urban areas that facilitate community building, really intertribal community building across urban and suburban landscapes because we know that we don’t always get to pick where we live.

We often move because of our jobs or where we have access to housing, and that may not match up with where our homelands are.

Also recognizing the way history has informed that and how many Native people have been removed from their homelands.

– First of all, this image fascinates me of this one community here.

What are we seeing?

– So this is the Little Earth community in Minneapolis.

So it’s several blocks over south Minneapolis in the Phillips neighborhood.

And the Little Earth housing complex is really adjacent to the American Indian cultural corridor or the Franklin neighborhood.

So blocks from this neighborhood are these community services, intentionally designed for American Indian people.

So in close proximity, walking distance to Little Earth is the Minneapolis Indian Center, the Indian Health Board in Minneapolis.

Today, there’s a number of cafs, coffee shops.

There’s a housing complex owned and operated by the Red Lake Nation.

So really, Little Earth has become kind of a cornerstone of the American Indian community in Minneapolis, from the 1960s onward to today.

– Maybe an irrelevant question, but do you have a sense of how many Native Americans are what we would call full-blooded as opposed to half maybe, or less?

– I don’t, and I would say that is also a hard question to answer because some of the best records that we have are from the United States census, where people self-identify.

– Norman: Uh-huh.

– So there’s a big margin of how people self-identify.

Other than that, tribes have really good records on people’s level of full-bloodedness or not.

But those are not overly accessible because tribes are really working to protect their data and their data sovereignty.

– I also have to ask a question about the effect that casinos have had on suburban home ownership.

– Right, so I think today when we think about suburbs or when we think about American Indians, we think about them living on reservations or in urban areas.

But another really common topic that we think about are casinos, right?

And this notion of rich Indians because of tribal gaming or tribal proceeds.

I would say in reality, very, very few tribal nations have accessed wealth through gaming.

– Really?

– 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 who 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 oftentimes just good for the 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.

– And those Native Americans who are actually employed by the casino?

– Both.

So for the very few tribal nations who are extremely successful and are able to do per capita payments, that is kind of across the board for enrolled tribal citizens.

– So it doesn’t really, it hasn’t really had that big an effect on home ownership?

It’s more like just kind of a get by sort of wage that these workers make at the casinos, and they don’t have to be Native Americans?

– Right, so I think these are two different things.

So, for tribes that operate tribal gaming, they support the community, broadly speaking.

They support the employer, the employees, and those employees could be Native or not Native, and they can pay them sustainable wages for them to access home ownership if that’s something they choose to do.

But on the other end of the spectrum are the tribes that have been extremely successful in gaming, and they have generated enough revenue to do per capita payments.

And those are for tribal citizens, whether or not they are employed by the tribe or not.

There haven’t been any studies that I’m aware of that have tracked tribal gaming’s impact on housing.

But we can generally assume the more income a person has, including an American Indian person, then the more likely they are able to access home ownership.

– There are some other images that you, that you raise having to do with, we’ll just call it Native American culture in general, since not all Native American tribes had teepees, for example.

– Kasey: Right.

– And some of these things become for, certainly for the rest of us, symbolic of the whole Native American culture, I suppose.

Is there a sense of kind of being patronizing when we see these things, do you think?

– Like teepees?

– Mm-hmm, yes.

– I think it depends on how they’re being used, right?

So in the image that we’re seeing right now, this is of the Minneapolis American Indian Center, which opened at this kind of height of an American Indian population growth in Minneapolis in the late 1960s and 1970s.

And it was there to serve a purpose.

It was a community-building institution, and it was just revitalized, updated, renovated over the last year or so and just reopened this past spring.

So in this regard, a teepee was brought in.

Dakota people have traditionally lived in tepees, so it did make sense, but we often see tepees as becoming representative of American Indians as a whole.

So there’s this kind of slippery slope, right?

I began by saying there’s 574 federally-recognized tribes.

Only a small portion of them actually lived in teepees, but we know that teepees have come to represent American Indian people.

– This whole trend that you write about in your book, is that ramping up?

Is it, are we going to be seeing Native American neighborhoods, or have we seen them already in the suburbs?

– I mean, it would be great if we saw more.

I think there are particular communities that have higher rates of American Indian residence than others, but I think that just has to do kind of with word of mouth and people moving to areas where they’re familiar with, where they have family, where they have kinship relationships, rather than actual intent of developers in suburban areas.

– With the federal housing rules, I assume, especially, like, by the time we get into the LBJ era where things changed so quickly in the 1960s and into the ’70s, has the whole redlining situation pretty much gone away, so far as we can tell?

Is there no restriction on where Native Americans might buy property if they have the money?

– Right, so there are fewer restrictions, de facto restrictions, on where American Indian people can access housing or home ownership.

But we see increased restrictions on how funding for American Indian housing can be used.

And oftentimes, those decisions are left to tribes, and rightly so, because they are politically sovereign entities.

So sometimes we see money that is earmarked for tribal nations for housing being limited to on-reservation use.

But again, what happens when over 70% of the population lives off reservation?

And we know that federal funding for American Indian housing is already limited.

So that’s one of the problems that we see today.

And then what happens in a place like Minneapolis, for example, that is very intertribal in nature, where we see a place like Little Earth that is predominantly American Indian, lack access to federal funding because it is off reservation and it is not a tribal entity.

So these are some of the problems that tribes deal with today, not specific to home ownership, but in terms of affordable housing for its tribal members.

What do you do when those tribal members live off reservation?

– Is that something, do you think, to speak for all of the tribes, is that something you think should be changed, this implied incentive to stay on the reservation, from an economic standpoint?

– I don’t know if there should be an incentive to stay on the reservation.

When reservations were created by the federal government, primarily in the 19th century, they were very intentionally located in oftentimes remote rural areas where, at that time even, wasn’t a whole lot of economic development, natural resources, et cetera.

– Except for oil, occasionally.

– Right.

– That’s a different story.

– And that’s a rarity.

So we know that remains the case, right?

So what happens when there are reservation communities today that are located in underdeveloped economic areas, that are very rural in nature, not located near an urban area where there’s increased job opportunities.

It’s not in the best interests of tribal nations to restrict where American Indian people and their tribal citizens can live.

I think the better option would be increased federal funding and flexibility on where federal funds can be used off reservation.

– Another generalization question here.

Do you have a sense that Native Americans in the suburbs are healthier and happier than those on the reservations?

– I don’t know, and I’m not sure if I’m qualified to answer that, but I would say that we could look at different measures of socioeconomic status.

We can look at records and data on educational attainment, employment, home ownership, and look at those and make a choice, make a decision.

But I don’t know, in terms of somebody’s life satisfaction and happiness, if somebody’s inherently happier because of if they live on a reservation or in a suburban community.

– Stronger sense of culture on the reservation as opposed to in a suburban community and the traditions behind?

– Right.

Absolutely living on reservation, right?

You have those direct ties to your tribal community.

But we know that today, American Indians who live in suburbs are also working to retain those community ties, cultural ties, and to build that community.

So often going back to their tribal community when they’re off reservation, but also building that community where they live today.

– Norman: Assuming this book of yours gets wide readership in let’s say, government circles, administrative circles, what effect would you like it to have?

– Interesting you should say that.

I’ve recently been invited to give a talk to HUD this winter, coming up in December.

And I’ve been thinking about that a lot, knowing that clearly somebody at HUD has read it in order to invite me.

But what do I want to share?

What do I want to expand on?

What do I hope those who haven’t read the book but will be listening to the talk, many will be tuning in from across the country remotely.

What do I want them to take away?

And I think a lot of that is what we just talked about, is recognizing the historical legacy of these really early housing programs, whether that be something like the U.S.-Dakota War or the Homestead Act in the 19th century, and how that has shaped where we are today.

But the current level of inflexibility on federal funding for American Indian housing and how that has really shaped where American Indian people have access to, and has prohibited home ownership in many cases and has really done a disservice to American Indian economic success and development, whether that be on reservation or off reservation.

– Well, Kasey Keeler, we’ll be looking at the suburbs with a whole new light in the years to come, thanks in part to your book, and it’s been a pleasure talking to you.

– Yes, thank you so much for this really great conversation.

I appreciate it.

– I’m Norman Gilliland, and I hope you’ll join me next time around for University Place Presents.

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