The Indigenous city before and within the settler one: Sasha Maria Suarez, ‘The Indigenous Turn in Urban History’, Journal of Urban History, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

The Indigenous city before and within the settler one: Sasha Maria Suarez, ‘The Indigenous Turn in Urban History’, Journal of Urban History, 2025

13Sep25

Excerpt: In recent years, scholarship on urban Indigenous history has embraced the interdisciplinary intersection of history and Indigenous studies, generating exciting new trends in the field. Early scholarship set a strong foundation but largely examined the contexts of United States postWorld War II era policy and Indigenous activism as represented by the Red Power movement. The works of scholars such as Paul Chaat Smith, Robert Warrior, Troy Johnson, Donald Fixico, and Susan Lobo, balanced the prescriptive assimilationist agendas of the 1950s and 1960s with American Indian resistance staged by intertribal organizations such as Indians of All Tribes and the American Indian Movement.1 In the last decade, emerging scholarship on urban Indigenous history has continued to build upon these early foundations by expanding its scope chronologically, geographically, and theoretically, providing flourishing new literature on the long durée of Indigenous presence in what scholars have articulated as the “settler city.”2 Even more so, we have seen a shift to the examination of Indigenous urbanity prior to the arrival of European settlers in places such as the United States, Canada, and Australia.

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