[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, Bd?te,
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, Bd?te,
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 caf?s, 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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