American Indians and the American Dream: Policies, Place, and Property in Minnesota

“Crucial new insights on Indigenous place, space, and suburbanity fly off the pages of this thoroughly researched and beautifully written exploration of the intersection between federal Indian and housing policies and the lived experiences and purposeful actions of Native people in Minnesota from the mid-nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. American Indians and the American Dream inaugurates a paradigm shift in the field by transcending the urban/reservation binary.” –Daniel M. Cobb, editor of Say We Are Nations: Documents of Politics and Protest in Indigenous America since 1887

“Kasey R. Keeler’s book explores the history of Indigenous urbanization in the United States from the exciting and largely under-researched lens of suburbanization. Focusing on the state of Minnesota, she convincingly demonstrates American Indian individuals and families’ agency as they made pragmatic use of–but also, when necessary, grappled with the structural racism of–existing federal, state, and even municipal policy to make an Indigenously suburban place of their own.” –Chris Andersen, coeditor of Indigenous in the City: Contemporary Identities and Cultural Innovation

“Keeler presents a revolutionary view behind the Native Americans’ inability to pursue home ownership in rural, urban and suburban areas in Minnesota as a result of white American colonialism and capitalism.” —UP Book Review

“The near-total absence of scholarship on American Indians in suburbs elevates the significance of Keeler’s work.” –University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Human Ecology

Kasey R. Keeler (Tuolumne Me-Wuk and Citizen Potawatomi) is assistant professor in the Department of Civil Society and Community Studies and in American Indian Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.