On Indigenous Urbanism

Criticism of a dialectical model & towards an integrated approach

Indigenous people’s are often portrayed as, by default, people who live in small villages or rural communities. Associating indigenous peoples with connectedness to nature and preservation of cultural traditions leads to a conception of indigenous peoples as “out of place” in fast-paced cosmopolitan cities. Some people tend to associate urban indigenous communities with alcoholism, homelessness, teen-pregnancy, and a wide range of social issues stemming from poverty. Without a materialist analysis of the economic conditions that lead to urban poverty, it is easy to boil this down to indigenousness being at odds with city living, but as I discuss later in this article, this is a misguided assumption based on a westernized framework of what constitutes urbanization.

Indigenous urbanism is a widely discussed topic, yet no one can seem to agree on what it is exactly. The Sen̓áḵw development and the emergence of the MST (Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh) Development Corporation as one of the largest developers in Canada represents a new interpretation of indigenous urbanism that works within colonial systems instead of against them.

It represents a compromise, that is, using a corporate entity as a vehicle to navigate through western land use regulations in order to build on top of a small piece of land that is irregularly shaped due to surrounding land being stolen by the very government the nations are negotiating with. This is not to say that the Sen̓áḵw development is bad; the project will likely benefit the nations and provide housing for thousands of both indigenous and non-indigenous peoples. What this is to say however, is accepting this as the new way forward for indigenous urbanism is to leave the vast majority of indigenous peoples unaccounted for.

The vast majority of indigenous nations in Canada do not have a fraction of the financial or social capital of the nations in Vancouver, and a development like Sen̓áḵw would likely be impossible in any other city on the continent. To say indigenous peoples have to work under colonial structures in order to be able to build on their own land is to strip them of their autonomy. The right to the city for indigenous people should not be gatekept by their colonizers.

This view of indigenous urbanism enforces the idea that indigeneity and urbanism are at odds with each other, and that the only way that the two can work together is through compromise. This view is adopted by Heather Dorries, who sees indigenous urbanism as a “dialectic analytic.” As Dorries puts it, these approaches work together because of, and not in spite of, their differing natures, “marking both concepts as constantly in flux and open to contestation" (Dorries 110).

My problem with this conceptualization is that it assumes ubiquitous definitions of what indigeneity and urbanism mean, when indigenous people and westerners have differing views of land itself. The article “Towards Coexistence: Exploring the Differences between Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Perspectives on Land” by Brooke Fry and Terry Mitchell analyzes interviews of both white Canadians and indigenous peoples and found that to indigenous peoples, land is viewed with a strong personal connection to themselves, emphasizing interdependencies, and a holistic and relational view of human beings and land as bonded together, while westerners viewed land as more disconnected from themselves, primarily serving as a privately-owned commodity with economic value (Fry and Mitchell).

If we define urbanism with a view of land of taken up by westerners, it is easy to see how Dorries dialectic model of indigenous urbanism is appealing, however, if we expand our view of urbanism to include indigenous perspectives of land, there is no need to view indigeneity and urbanism as at odds, considering the fact that some indigenous people lived in sizable, relatively dense urban settlements far before Europeans ever arrived in North America.

Under a truly decolonized conception of indigenous urbanism, no compromise is necessary. If the city’s governance structure is designed to disregard Indigenous perspectives, it must be totally changed. “‘This is an Indigenous city; why don’t we see it?’ Indigenous urbanism and spatial production in Winnipeg” uses Winnipeg as a case study to examine how indigenous people can organize to change their cities, and work towards indigenizing the very systems that marginalize them. If colonial institutions don’t provide the land or resources for indigenous development, we can indigenize what’s already been built. As the article argues, Indigenous peoples need to be at the forefront of spatial production itself, transforming communities from within and tearing down institutions that benefit from the systemic exclusion of indigenous peoples (Nejad et al.).

This is what I believe indigenous urbanism is, not the westernized conception of urbanization watering down indigenous priorities, but a transformation of the theoretical and applied approaches of urbanization to align with indigenous perspectives of land and stewardship.

Works Cited:

Dorries, Heather. “Indigenous urbanism as an analytic: Towards Indigenous Urban theory.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 47, no. 1, 2022, pp. 110–118, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.13129. 

Fry, Brooke, and Mitchell, Terry. "Towards coexistence: Exploring the differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous perspectives on land." Native Studies Review 23.1/2 (2016): 35-64.

Nejad, Sarem, et al. “‘this is an indigenous city; why don’t we see it?’ indigenous urbanism and spatial production in Winnipeg.” Canadian Geographies / Géographies Canadiennes, vol. 63, no. 3, 2019, pp. 413–424, https://doi.org/10.1111/cag.12520.