Urban Renewal, Historic Preservation, and Indigenous Erasure

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Urban renewal and historical preservation are implicated in Indigenous erasure. Focusing on Providence, Rhode Island, I argue that the geographies of race and class of mid-20th century urban renewal have a longer-term history in 19th century land clearance projects. Among the disproportionate number of nonwhites affected were the city’s Indigenous people who were its unseen victims. They were uprooted from their homes, edifices filled with the sounds, smells, noises, and feelings of being lived in that municipal planners considered substandard or blighted. Structural debris and earth filled with archaeological traces of deeper histories were removed and redeposited. This unmaking and making of sites complicate understandings of the Indigenous urban landscape. Historical preservation legislation designed to address the destructive impacts of urban redevelopment underserves the so-called “urban Indian” community and its history because of its reliance on thematic frameworks informed by terminal narratives that deny that Indigenous people can be modern and urban. Moving forward, urban histories need to be more inclusive and the eligibility criteria for historic preservation must recognize the modern heritage of Indigenous people in U.S. cities routinely considered as lacking aesthetic value or sufficient integrity.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37645.0