City of Dispossessions: Indigenous Peoples, African Americans, and the Creation of Modern Detroit

Kyle T. May's City of Dispossessions is an ambitious book. Mays argues that Detroit is built upon the physical, social, cultural, and discursive erasure of Indigenous and Black bodies from urban space as an ongoing effect of settler colonialism in the twentieth century. Mays is clear that he did not intend the book to be a “tribal history” nor a history of Indigenous and Black communities in relational formations but instead about the ways in which those in power, white settler descendants, actively dispossessed communities of their places and spaces in Detroit. Throughout the first several chapters Mays outlines the historical moments that allowed for such dispossessions to occur, starting with the actual history of Cadillac, Pontiac, and Indigenous communities in contact zones. Synthetic in composition, Mays carefully weaves together the narratives about Indigenous people authored by white settlers throughout the first two hundred years of Detroit's European settlement, culminating in the 1901 bicentenary celebration, an event which Mays argues cemented Detroit as a white settler masculine space. Building on performance scholarship Mays interpreted the bicentenary celebration as a cathartic expression of white dominance and historical revisionism built upon anti-Blackness and anti-Indigenous formations.Mays's chapter on reclaiming Detroit during the age of Fordism shows how Indigenous activists, namely Charles Eastman, attempted to reframe such early twentieth-century stories. Via his connections to Detroit through organizations like the YMCA, Eastman sought to reconstruct the city as a space for authentic Native representations, particularly centering Indigenous masculinity as a counterpoint to white settler masculine culture. Mays's chapter on citizenship and sovereignty melds a history of urban renewal projects in Detroit largely affecting African Americans with urban Indigenous social clubs advocating for their intertribal communities during the era of federal termination. Mays connects the BIA's termination policy with African American dispossession of land through slum clearance under Mayor Albert Cobo. In Mays's treatment, such episodes serve to bridge the settler colonial violence of an earlier period with the subjugation of urban people of color under the guise of urban revitalization and renewal. Mays's final two chapters illuminate some of the on-the-ground details that the earlier chapters sometimes lack. Mays's discussion of urban Indigenous historical actors like Esther Mays (the author's great-grandmother) shows how Indigenous community members utilized public-facing organizations such as Great Lakes Northern Stars to advocate for Native child welfare and to testify against child removal in Detroit and nationally. Later, Mays shows how Black nationalist activists like James “Jimmy” Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs advocated for land and power for Black Detroiters without acknowledging the urban Indigenous community within the city—hindering the potential alliances between Native and Black radicals during the 1960s and 1970s.City of Dispossessions’ most original contribution comes in its last chapter about Indigenous education and community control over schooling in Detroit. Mays shows how in the era of Red Power, Indigenous Detroiters utilized the rhetoric of cultural and educational self-determination to form the Detroit Indian Educational and Cultural Center (DIECC) in 1974 and later the Medicine Bear Academy located at historic Fort Wayne in 1994. This effort was inspired by Afrocentric educational organizing by Black Detroiters who successfully opened the first independent Afrocentric school in 1972, providing an example for Indigenous activists in the following decades. Mays's discussion of the creation and unfortunate closure of Medicine Bear Academy highlights the tension in being Indigenous, urban, and modern in a city where Native folks had been actively narrated as disappeared in a biracial space.Fundamentally the story of Medicine Bear Academy encapsulates the story that Mays narrates throughout the book, where the white male settlers actively dispossessed Indigenous and Black histories and bodies of a future within the modernizing urban space of Detroit. While some of Mays's arguments and historical examples follow well-trodden paths in other scholarship, the exploration of the particular Black and Indigenous organizing and successes in Detroit are original and necessary, enriching the field of urban history. Mays's most compelling and original contributions lie in his careful exploration of understudied Indigenous activists and community members in Detroit who actively utilized their urban realities to push back against forces attempting to silence them. One hopes that further work about these individuals will be forthcoming from the author, as they are the compelling threads which tie the fabric of sometimes disparate histories together. Overall, City of Dispossessions is a welcome addition to the growing field of urban Indigenous studies, cultural studies, and urban history.