Settler Colonialism in a Settler Regime: Race, Place, and Internal/Settler Colonialism in Modern Detroit

Amidst the great social upheaval that occurred during the 1960s and 1970s emerged a conceptual model called “internal colonialism.” Activists and scholars alike used the term to explain the creation and subordination of Black Americans in inner-city U.S. ghettos. Powerful in its explanatory nature, it was not without its criticism, which mainly centered on the fact that it did not quite fit the tenets of “classic colonialism.” Still, very few mentioned the major flaw of the model: that settler colonialism existed, and that Indigenous people remained ¾ even in urban areas. Relatedly, scholars of urban history have long ignored the role of indigeneity in the development of modern U.S. cities, especially in Detroit. Indeed, as Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz writes in An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, “The history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism.” Similarly, I argue that we cannot understand the history of modern Detroit without settler colonialism.

This paper discusses the role that indigeneity played in the development of modern Detroit. Using community documents, local newspapers and oral histories, this paper considers how a variety of actors deployed indigeneity in order to both construct and challenge ideas of belonging, citizenship, gender and race in Detroit. I begin by examining how, at Detroit’s 1901 Bicentennial, elite White men used indigeneity in order to construct a historical memory that erased Indigenous histories from the area. I end by examining how Indigenous women reclaimed indigeneity at the end of the 20th century. Through the creation of cultural and educational institutions, Indigenous women asserted their presence in a city that had long been predicated on Blackness and Whiteness.