Indigenous Rights To The City

This book breaks new ground in understanding urban indigeneity in policy and planning practice. It is the first comprehensive and comparative study that foregrounds the complex interplay of multiple organisations involved in translating indigenous rights to the city in Latin America, focussing on the cities of La Paz and Quito. The book establishes how planning for urban indigeneity looks in practice, even in seemingly progressive settings, such as Bolivia and Ecuador, where indigenous rights to the city are recognised within constitutions. It demonstrates that the translation of indigenous rights to the city is a process involving different actor groups operating within state institutions and indigenous communities, which often hold conflicting interests and needs. The book also establishes a set of theoretical, methodological, and practical foundations for envisaging how urban indigenous planning in Latin America and elsewhere should be understood, studied, and undertaken: As a process which embraces conflict and challenges power relations within indigenous communities and between these communities and the state. This book will appeal to practitioners, researchers, and students working within the fields of urban planning, urban development, and indigenous rights.

Research on Indigenous issues rarely focuses on life in major metropolitan centres. Instead, there is a tendency to frame rural locations as emblematic of authentic or “real” Indigeneity. While such a perspective may support Indigenous struggles for territory and recognition, it fails to account for large swaths of contemporary Indigenous realities, including the increased presence of Indigenous people in cities. The contributors to this volume explore the implications of urbanization on the production of distinctive Indigenous identities in Canada, the US, New Zealand, and Australia. In doing so, they demonstrate the resilience, creativity, and complexity of the urban Indigenous presence, both in Canada and internationally.

Indigenous Invisibility in the City contextualises the significant social change in Indigenous life circumstances and resurgence that came out of social movements in cities. It is about Indigenous resurgence and community development by First Nations people for First Nations people in cities. Seventy-five years ago, First Nations peoples began a significant post-war period of relocation to cities in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand. First Nations peoples engaged in projects of resurgence and community development in the cities of the four settler states. First Nations peoples, who were motivated by aspirations for autonomy and empowerment, went on to create the foundations of Indigenous social infrastructure. This book explains the ways First Nations people in cities created and took control of their own futures. A fact largely wilfully ignored in policy contexts. Today, differences exist over the way governments and First Nations peoples see the role and responsibilities of Indigenous institutions in cities. What remains hidden in plain sight is their societal function as a social and political apparatus through which much of the social processes of Indigenous resurgence and community development in cities occurred. The struggle for self-determination in settler cities plays out through First Nations people’s efforts to sustain their own institutions and resurgence, but also rights and recognition in cities. This book will be of interest to Indigenous studies scholars, urban sociologists, urban political scientists, urban studies scholars, and development studies scholars interested in urban issues and community building and development.

While cities like Winnipeg, Minneapolis, Saskatoon, Rapid City, Edmonton, Missoula, Regina, and Tulsa are places where Indigenous marginalization has been most acute, they have also long been sites of Indigenous placemaking and resistance to settler colonialism. Although such cities have been denigrated as “ordinary” or banal in the broader urban literature, they are exceptional sites to study Indigenous resurgence. T​he urban centres of the continental plains have featured Indigenous housing and food co-operatives, social service agencies, and schools. The American Indian Movement initially developed in Minneapolis in 1968, and Idle No More emerged in Saskatoon in 2013. The editors and authors of Settler City Limits , both Indigenous and settler, address urban struggles involving Anishinaabek, Cree, Creek, Dakota, Flathead, Lakota, and Métis peoples. Collectively, these studies showcase how Indigenous people in the city resist ongoing processes of colonial dispossession and create spaces for themselves and their families. Working at intersections of Indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, urban studies, geography, and sociology, this book examines how the historical and political conditions of settler colonialism have shaped urban development in the Canadian Prairies and American Plains. Settler City Limits frames cities as Indigenous spaces and places, both in terms of the historical geographies of the regions in which they are embedded, and with respect to ongoing struggles for land, life, and self-determination.

Centuries-old community planning practices in Indigenous communities in Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia have, in modern times, been eclipsed by ill-suited western approaches, mostly derived from colonial and neo-colonial traditions. Since planning outcomes have failed to reflect the rights and interests of Indigenous people, attempts to reclaim planning have become a priority for many Indigenous nations throughout the world. In Reclaiming Indigenous Planning, scholars and practitioners connect the past and present to facilitate better planning for the future. With examples from the Canadian Arctic to the Australian desert, and the cities, towns, reserves and reservations in between, contributors engage topics including Indigenous mobilization and resistance, awareness-raising and seven-generations visioning, Indigenous participation in community planning processes, and forms of governance. Relying on case studies and personal narratives, these essays emphasize the critical need for Indigenous communities to reclaim control of the political, socio-cultural, and economic agendas that shape their lives. The first book to bring Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors together across continents, Reclaiming Indigenous Planning shows how urban and rural communities around the world are reformulating planning practices that incorporate traditional knowledge, cultural identity, and stewardship over land and resources. Contributors include Robert Adkins (Community and Economic Development Consultant, USA), Chris Andersen (Alberta), Giovanni Attili (La Sapienza), Aaron Aubin (Dillon Consulting), Shaun Awatere (Landcare Research, New Zealand), Yale Belanger (Lethbridge), Keith Chaulk (Memorial), Stephen Cornell (Arizona), Sherrie Cross (Macquarie), Kim Doohan (Native Title and Resource Claims Consultant, Australia), Kerri Jo Fortier (Simpcw First Nation), Bethany Haalboom (Victoria University, New Zealand), Lisa Hardess (Hardess Planning Inc.), Garth Harmsworth (Landcare Research, New Zealand), Sharon Hausam (Pueblo of Laguna), Michael Hibbard (Oregon), Richard Howitt (Macquarie), Ted Jojola (New Mexico), Tanira Kingi (AgResearch, New Zealand), Marcus Lane (Griffith), Rebecca Lawrence (Umea), Gaim Lunkapis (Malaysia Sabah), Laura Mannell (Planning Consultant, Canada), Hirini Matunga (Lincoln University, New Zealand), Deborah McGregor (Toronto), Oscar Montes de Oca (AgResearch, New Zealand), Samantha Muller (Flinders), David Natcher (Saskatchewan), Frank Palermo (Dalhousie), Robert Patrick (Saskatchewan), Craig Pauling (Te Runanga o Ngai Tahu), Kurt Peters (Oregon State), Libby Porter (Monash), Andrea Procter (Memorial), Sarah Prout (Combined Universities Centre for Rural Health, Australia), Catherine Robinson (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, Australia), Shadrach Rolleston (Planning Consultant, New Zealand), Leonie Sandercock (British Columbia), Crispin Smith (Planning Consultant, Canada), Sandie Suchet-Pearson (Macquarie), Siri Veland (Brown), Ryan Walker (Saskatchewan), Liz Wedderburn (AgResearch, New Zealand).

Planning is becoming one of the key battlegrounds for Indigenous people to negotiate meaningful articulation of their sovereign territorial and political rights, reigniting the essential tension that lies at the heart of Indigenous-settler relations. But what actually happens in the planning contact zone - when Indigenous demands for recognition of coexisting political authority over territory intersect with environmental and urban land-use planning systems in settler-colonial states? This book answers that question through a critical examination of planning contact zones in two settler-colonial states: Victoria, Australia and British Columbia, Canada. Comparing the experiences of four Indigenous communities who are challenging and renegotiating land-use planning in these places, the book breaks new ground in our understanding of contemporary Indigenous land justice politics. It is the first study to grapple with what it means for planning to engage with Indigenous peoples in major cities, and the first of its kind to compare the underlying conditions that produce very different outcomes in urban and non-urban planning contexts. In doing so, the book exposes the costs and limits of the liberal mode of recognition as it comes to be articulated through planning, challenging the received wisdom that participation and consultation can solve conflicts of sovereignty. This book lays the theoretical, methodological and practical groundwork for imagining what planning for coexistence might look like: a relational, decolonizing planning praxis where self-determining Indigenous peoples invite settler-colonial states to their planning table on their terms.