In her groundbreaking history of the urbanization and suburbanization of Native communities in Minnesota, Kasey Keeler shows how American Indians have navigated the intersection of federal Indian policy and federal housing policy to access homeownership, particularly in the suburbs. From the Homestead Act of 1862 to the housing bubble of the early 2000s and today’s Wall of Forgotten Natives, Keeler offers new ways to think about histories of place and placemaking for American Indians here in Minnesota and highlights the contradictions and limits of the ever-alluring “American Dream.”
Biography:
Kasey Keeler (Tuolumne Me-Wuk and Citizen Potawatomi) is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a joint appointment in the Department of Civil Society & Community Studies and the American Indian & Indigenous Studies Program. She is author of American Indians and the American Dream: Policies, Place, and Property in Minnesota. Raised in Coon Rapids, she received her PhD in American Studies from the University of Minnesota. She is currently working on two new projects, one that centers Paul Bunyan narratives in American Indian dispossession and logging across the Great Lakes and another that looks at the Homestead Act through the lens of ongoing Indigenous Dispossession.