ABSTRACT
Given this volume’s subject matter of “the world of Indigenous North America,” framing a discussion on urban Indigenous landscapes by national context would prove next to impossible. Instead, the chapter focuses on North American contexts. As such, Canadian, American, and Mexican analyses would seem a logical, if conventional, tack to take. Indeed, a large and growing literature has explored urban Indigenous issues in this manner, and with good reason: the pace and trajectory of contemporary urban Indigenous landscapes are directly and indirectly shaped in powerful ways by the states within whose national contexts they (are often forced to) exist. In an urban Indigenous context, then, we may readily understand how state policies not only pushed and pulled Indigenous individuals and families to and from traditional territories and into (and out of) urban locales, but shaped the very economic, social, cultural, and political trajectories of life we could lead once we arrived. They did so, however, in terms that, though vernacular to nationally inscribed geo-political space, followed a familiar—if somewhat abstract—trajectory of dislocation, loss, and renewal.
