Gakaabikaang: White Earth Ojibwe Women and the Creation of Indian Minneapolis in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

This dissertation is an historical examination of how White Earth Ojibwe women’s community organizing labor in twentieth-century Minneapolis, Minnesota created the necessary foundation on which later activism and Indigenous institutions were built. I use interdisciplinary methodologies to analyze how, between 1920 and 1975, urban White Earth Ojibwe women’s community organizing within informal, social networks was transformed and integrated into the predominantly white civic structures and systems of Minneapolis. By utilizing non-Indigenous community spaces and civic systems of funding, Ojibwe women were better able to further their own agendas in support of the urban American Indian community. My dissertation demonstrates how Ojibwe women were practicing a specific Ojibwe placemaking process that relied upon continuing cultural norms and practices of community responsibility. As such, I center Ojibwe women’s efforts concomitantly as labor and resistance to assimilation, arguing that methods of organizing community support extends conversations about activism beyond traditional on-the-ground political activism. This dissertation expands conversations on what it meant to be urban and Indigenous in the upper Midwest in the twentieth century and has implications for further studies of American cities as spaces of Indigenous presence, survival, and resistance. By approaching an urban American Indian history through a gendered, tribally-specific lens, this dissertation contributes to scholarship on settler colonialism in the twentieth century, and interrogates conversations on the gendered nature of urban Indigenous assimilation and activism and resistance.