Native Providence: Memory, Community, and Survivance in the Northeast

2021 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

A city of modest size, Providence, Rhode Island, had the third-largest Native American population in the United States by the first decade of the twentieth century. Native Providence tells their stories at this historical moment and in the decades before and after, a time when European Americans claimed that Northeast Natives had mostly vanished.

Denied their rightful place in modernity, men, women, and children from Narragansett, Nipmuc, Pequot, Wampanoag, and other ancestral communities traveled diverse and complicated routes to make their homes in this city. They found each other, carved out livelihoods, and created neighborhoods that became their urban homelands--new places of meaningful attachments. Accounts of individual lives and family histories emerge from historical and anthropological research in archives, government offices, historical societies, libraries, and museums and from community memories, geography, and landscape.

Patricia E. Rubertone chronicles the survivance of the Native people who stayed, left and returned, who faced involuntary displacement by urban renewal, who lived in Provi­dence briefly, or who made their presence known both there and in the wider indigenous and settler-colonial worlds. These individuals reenvision the city's past through everyday experiences and illuminate documentary and spatial tactics of inequality that erased Native people from most nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history.

Author: Patricia E. Rubertone
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 12/01/2020
Pages: 462
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.86lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 1.19d
ISBN: 9781496217554


Review Citation(s):
Choice 05/01/2021

About the Author
Patricia E. Rubertone is a professor of anthropology at Brown University. She is the author of Archaeologies of Placemaking: Monuments, Memories, and Engagement in Native North America and Grave Undertakings: An Archaeology of Roger Williams and the Narragansett Indians.