Abstract
The New Deal programs of the 1930s are typically considered the origins of federal housing policy and the inequality it has enshrined. The Federal Housing Authority, for example, provided millions of people with housing access by providing affordable home loans. At the same time, it also invented the practice of redlining, creating urban zones of racial exclusion for Black families and other marginalized communities, the effects of which are still felt today.
But in American Indians and the American Dream: Policies, Place, and Property in Minnesota, Kasey R. Keeler argues that this is not the entire story. She places the origins of federal housing policy as early as the mid–nineteenth century after calls to open so–called public domain lands for the purposes of westward expansion, resource extraction, and colonization. The passage of three laws within weeks of each other during the Civil War—the Homestead Act, the Pacific Railway Act, and the Morrill Act—“mark the first time anywhere in the world,” Keeler contends, that “a nation so thoroughly and broadly committed to such a scale the resources (land and money) for the purposes of settlement and higher education” (p. 42).
The Homestead Act, in particular, allowed U.S. citizens and newly arrived European immigrants seeking citizenship a chance to buy affordable land “at one dollar and twenty–five cents, or less, an acre; or eighty acres or less of such unappropriated lands, at two dollars and fifty cents per acre,” eating away 270 million acres of Indigenous territory across 33 states in the process. Keeler writes that the Homestead Act “must be considered an early housing policy that set the tone for federal housing programs and policies that were to come” (p. 44). The law made a clear connection between citizenship and land ownership, thus defining what settlement, homeownership, and housing would look like and to whom it was available for decades and centuries to come. Keeler demonstrates that the federal policies that enabled and incentivized the processes of settler colonialism—that is, taking the land and disappearing the original people—are foundational to, if not the first forms of, federal housing policies. “The American Dream, understood as land- and homeownership,” Keeler writes, “by necessity, and much like suburbanization, requires the dispossession of American Indian people past and present” (p. 11).
This compelling insight structures the rest of the book, which begins with Keeler’s own experience as a “suburban Indian” raised in a Minneapolis suburb. She studies the deep and contemporary Indigenous histories of Mnisóta Makhóčhe (Dakota homelands) and what later became the settler state of Minnesota by looking at how land–based federal legislation laid the groundwork for modern housing policy. Her perspective upends the normative assumption about the origin of housing inequality in the United States, offering a different analysis of how to understand and “fix” the housing crisis, especially among a largely off–reservation and increasingly urban and suburban American Indian population.
This intervention isn’t just an addition to previous scholarship; it is a conceptual refashioning of how we understand federal housing policy as it relates not only to American Indians but also to the broader U.S. population who invariably live atop Indigenous land. Entire nations of people had to be removed, and were sometimes the victims of genocide, for real estate development and the pursuit of the “American Dream.” Put another way, private and public property was created through immense violence and dispossession targeting American Indians. Yet the erasure was never a complete process, as American Indian communities persisted and forged new connections to urban and suburban places.
That persistence of presence is found throughout the pages of American Indians and the American Dream: Dakota families remained in Minnesota despite the Dakota genocide and removal that began in 1862; American Indian families built lives within the urban and suburban environments of Minnesota’s Twin Cities throughout the entire twentieth century despite federal policies of relocation and termination aimed at liquidating federal trust responsibilities to tribal nations; modern American Indian activism and the founding of the American Indian Movement in Minneapolis in 1968 helped carve out space for modern urban and suburban American Indian communities, such as Little Earth of United Tribes, the only nontribal, American Indian-preference Section 8 housing complex in the United States; and the Indian Home Loan Guarantee Program, created in 1992, which helped increase American Indian homeownership, especially in Minnesota suburban communities. Each of these historical examples makes clear that federal Indian policy and federal housing policy exist in a critical dialectic that cannot be easily siloed off into discrete categories.
Likewise, modern American Indian experiences do not easily fall within distinct geographic categories of on or off reservation or along the urban/reservation divide. Keeler adds a third and overlooked class of suburban Indians who “are dissimilar from their American Indian counterparts in urban areas and from those who live on reservations in rural places not only because of their residential location but also because of key socioeconomic indicators and in terms of identity” (p. 145). Because of increased access to education, employment, and homeownership, suburban Indians experience more upward social mobility.
Keeler’s study, however, is not one of triumphalism. While there has been increased homeownership among a certain segment of American Indian people in Minnesota, in recent years there has been in the heart of Minneapolis an increased visible houseless Indigenous population, leading to confrontations and challenges with the police and city officials. The interventions Keeler puts forward touch on how the federal trust status of American Indians is typically seen as only relevant within context of federal trust lands on reservations. But American Indians don’t stop being American Indians legally or culturally when they leave reservations. So why don’t those federal trust responsibilities, guaranteed through treaties and agreements based on a mutual recognition of sovereignty, follow them off the reservation? For example, some federal housing funds available to reservation–based, tribal communities don’t apply in urban or suburban geographies. Keeler raises these important questions while pushing scholars to take seriously how settler colonialism isn’t just a feature of housing inequality, but foundational to it.