Full Description
2021 Choice Outstanding Academic Title
A city of modest size, Providence, Rhode Island, had the third-largest Native American population in the United States by the first decade of the twentieth century. Native Providence tells the stories of the city's Native residents at this historical moment and in the decades before and after, a time when European Americans claimed that Northeast Natives had mostly vanished.
Denied their rightful place in modernity, men, women, and children from Narragansett, Nipmuc, Pequot, Wampanoag, and other ancestral communities traveled diverse and complicated routes to make their homes in this city. They found each other, carved out livelihoods, and created neighborhoods that became their urban homelands-new places of meaningful attachments. Accounts of individual lives and family histories emerge from historical and anthropological research in archives, government offices, historical societies, libraries, and museums and from community memories, geography, and landscape.
Patricia E. Rubertone chronicles the survivance of the Native people who stayed, left, and returned, or lived in Providence briefly, who faced involuntary displacement by urban renewal, and who made their presence known in this city and in the wider Indigenous and settler-colonial worlds. Their everyday experiences reenvision Providence's past and illuminate documentary and spatial tactics of inequality that erased Native people from most nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
A Note on the Maps
Introduction: Narrating Indigeneity in a "Thoroughfare Town"
1. Fox Point: A Waterfront Homeland, Encounters at a Stopping-Over Place, and Indigenous Legibility
2. Lippitt Hill: Homelands of the Hill and Hollows, Unholy Water, and Traditional Knowledge
3. Upper South Providence: Homeland at the Crossroads, Churchgoing, and Community Making
4. Lower South Providence: Habitations by the River and Bay, Mobility, and the Urban Imaginary
5. Mashapaug Pond: The Pond Lands, from Planting Fields to Industrial Transformations
6. Federal Hill: Homeland above the River at the Town's Doorstep, Commonplace Streets, and Uncommon Labor
7. Johnston: Homeland at the Borderlands, Powwows, and Urban Mythscapes
Epilogue: Imagining Past, Present, and Future Urbanity
Appendix: Native Residents of Providence Homelands
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
