American Indians and the American Dream: Policies, Place, and Property in Minnesota by Kasey Keeler (review)

Reviewed by: American Indians and the American Dream: Policies, Place, and Property in Minnesota by Kasey Keeler Coll Thrush (bio) American Indians and the American Dream: Policies, Place, and Property in Minnesota by Kasey Keeler University of Minnesota Press, 2023 WHAT DO a Civil War–era campaign of genocide and a 1992 federal home loan program have to do with each other? A lot, it turns out. Kasey R. Keeler's excellent examination of the politics of land and place in the spaces that became the suburbs of Minneapolis-St. Paul takes a longue-durée approach to the question of Indigenous homemaking and the logics and practices of settler colonialism. The result is a book that should be on the shelves and syllabi of scholars interested in the intersection of urban and Indigenous histories—and perhaps on the desks of policymakers as well. Based on her doctoral research at Minnesota, Keeler's book is a meticulously researched and fine-grained analysis of the ways in which Indigenous people engaged with the so-called American Dream, a potent phrase Keeler tells us was first popularized in the 1930s but emerged from long-standing expectations of Manifest Destiny. Her central argument is this: that Indigenous individuals and families engaged with the politics of home ownership and place-making in complex ways that highlighted their own agency in the face of seemingly overwhelming settler systems of property. Keeler's introduction begins with the story of her upbringing as a suburban Indian growing up far from her ancestral territories and briefly sets the larger scholarly context of the work within the small but growing field of urban Indigenous histories. Keeler then sets about doing the important work of crafting a deep context for the welter of federal and other programs that are the primary focus of the book. She does this by starting her narrative with the 1862 Dakota War, in which the territories that became the suburbs with which she is primarily concerned were transformed from Indigenous homelands to settler homesteads through profound violence, exclusion, and narrative erasure. From there, Keeler takes us through a complex administrative and bureaucratic history without ever losing sight of the lived experiences of Indigenous people. One of the great strengths of this book is that it challenges previous scholarly emphasis on formal post-WWII federal relocation programs, recognizing their importance while simultaneously illustrating the many End Page 126 other policies and programs that shaped Indigenous people's relationship with place and property in the suburbs. Here, for example, we learn about the relationship between the Federal Housing Administration, founded in 1934, and the Indian Reorganization Act of the same year, a relationship in which Indian policy and housing policy were, to use Keeler's term, "entangled." When she does turn to postwar federal relocation, Keeler pointedly and usefully reframes it as racialized housing policy. Following this, Keeler provides a close analysis of Little Earth, the first and only Indigenous housing project in the United States, and her final chapter is a detailed discussion of the 1992 Section 184 Indian Home Loan Guarantee Program. Throughout, Keeler deftly keeps policy, the economic realities of Indigenous life in the suburbs, and nuanced questions of identity in play, all the while foregrounding Indigenous voices where they exist in the archives. Despite the array of colonial forces facing Indigenous people in the Twin Cities and their suburbs, this is not a story of mere victimhood or dispossession but rather one of survivance and of Indigenous people's engagement with the shifting and mercurial American Dream. Ending with a trenchant meditation on present-day Indigenous and racialized houselessness in Minnesota, this book resists the temptation of many urban Indigenous histories to separate the period before settler urbanity from later twentieth-century phenomena. All too often, Indigenous people disappear from urban histories after a war or treaty, then reappear (if at all) in the wake of federal relocation and/or pan-Indian activism. American Indians and the American Dream challenges this disjointed and dismembering periodization by articulating the long arc of urban history in which Indigenous people were and are always present. Keeler has made an extremely significant contribution here, providing an almost...