Urban Renewal, Historical Preservation, and the Erasure of Indigenous Modernity

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Indigenous people’s urban experiences represent some of latest chapters in their stories of survivance. Yet they remain largely invisible archaeologically because of urban renewal, historic preservation practices, and the myth that U.S. cities do not have modern Indigenous histories. Geographies of race and class underwriting mid-twentieth century urban renewal and earlier land clearance made the Indigenous inhabitants of Providence its unseen victims. A modest-size city in the Northeast, Providence had the third-largest Native American population in the United States by the first decade of the twentieth century. Structural debris from their homes that city planners considered blighted and often their contents, along with archaeological traces of deeper histories were removed and redeposited, erasing and compromising the Indigenous urban landscape. Historic preservation law designed to address the destruction caused by urban renewal underserve Indigenous communities due to reliance on thematic frameworks that deny that Indigenous people can be modern and urban. Moving forward, urban heritage must be more inclusive and collaborative, and the eligibility criteria for preservation must recognize sites of Indigenous occupation routinely considered lacking aesthetic value or sufficient integrity.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 41665.0