Michelle R. Jacobs's Indigenous Memory, Urban Reality aims to demonstrate the ongoing costs that settler colonialism has on urban Indigenous peoples in order to “increase settlers’ accountability to Indigenous peoples and communities” (p. 26). Given the recent demand by President Donald Trump that the Washington Commanders and Cleveland Guardians revert to their previous demeaning Indigenous-referring names or face consequences, Jacob's exploration of the long-term negative impacts of the 1950s relocation of Indigenous peoples from reservations to urban settings as a means of assimilating them and stripping them of their culture, coupled with the ongoing damage of settler colonialism, is both timely and important. Her work is even more critical when we take into account that “approximately 75% of enumerated” Indigenous people (p. 26) and 87 percent of self-identified Indigenous people live off reservation. As we will see, this latter group of non-enumerated Indigenous-identifying people is critical to her argument.Jacobs identifies as a “white-settler-trespasser-woman” who was both socialized into and complicit with white settler colonialism, but who is trying her best to holistically share the stories of urban Indigenous peoples in northeastern Ohio. Indigenous Memory, Urban Reality is at its best when Jacobs does just that. Her extensive interviews with Indigenous relocators, Indigenous folks who relocated (or whose ancestors relocated) from a reservation to northeast Ohio and who maintain tribal membership, and reclaimers, people, often white-presenting, who claim Indigenous ancestry but who lack official tribal membership, do an excellent job of situating Indigenous and Indigenous-identifying people by what they believe and how they act. Jacobs finds that relocators in urban settings focus on maintaining (italics are hers) their Indigenous identities in spite of the discrimination and poverty that they often face. They do so by maintaining membership in organizations with other Indigenous relocators, by visiting their tribal nation's reservation when they can, and most importantly, by passing on Indigenous “perspectives and values” to Indigenous youths (p. 133).Meanwhile, reclaimers often focus on “being and becoming” Indigenous through the adoption and practice of pan-Indian practices that they believe they had stolen from them through settler colonial assimilation practices. Jacobs notes that, unlike relocators, most reclaimers were not socialized into Indigenous perspectives and values as children. Instead, they decided to reclaim their latent Indigenous identities as adults and often connect to their indigenousness intuitively. The most important difference between relocators and reclaimers is that reclaimers feel the need to engage in pan-Indian practices as a means of signaling and demonstrating, to themselves and others, their indigeneity. They do so through, for example, the gifting, offering, or laying of tobacco, especially in conjunction to ritualistic prayers to the four directions and the Creator. Jacobs herself adopted the practice of gifting tobacco to the reclaimers that she interviewed once she understood this as an expectation, one that she emphasizes relocators did not have. Reclaimers also created spirit plates, setting aside portions of food on a separate plate, as offerings to the ancestors and smudged/burned herbs, especially sage and cedar, as a means of cleansing a place of unwanted spirits or as a means of making a space holy. In addition, Jacobs noted that many reclaimers focused on crafting, such as beadmaking or the tanning of leather to make moccasins or the heads of drums, as a means of connecting with their indigeneity. Finally, the author found that many reclaimers viewed their connection with nature as an indication of their Indigeneity, some going so far as to wish that they could return to the good old days when Indigenous peoples were supposedly one with nature, an idea that Jacobs rightly ties to the repackaging and selling of Indianness by white settler colonialism, an idea that the author finds reclaimers to be particularly susceptible to. To emphasize this fact, Jacobs notes that not a single relocator that she interviewed suggested a need to learn wilderness survival skills and almost none of them discussed the details of Indigenous practices, even if they did practice them at pow wows or other Native American events. Instead, relocators had no specific need to demonstrate their indigeneity, to themselves or others.Jacobs reminds us that the claims of indigeneity by “pretendians,” those who falsely claim Indigenous ancestry for their own ends, need to be rejected. That said, she reminds us that we need to be careful “regarding summary dismissal of the claims of all people working to reclaim Indigenous identities in urban and other nonreservation contexts” (p. 245). That said, in spite of the clear differences that she finds between the practices of relocators and reclaimers, given the impact of white settler colonialism and its long practice of Indigenous erasure, it is not clear how one ought to go about differentiating between deserving and non-deserving reclaimers.
Andrae Marak (Thu,) studied this question.