Settler Colonial City: Racism and Inequity in Postwar Minneapolis by David Hugill (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Settler Colonial City: Racism and Inequity in Postwar Minneapolis by David Hugill Natchee Blu Barnd Settler Colonial City: Racism and Inequity in Postwar Minneapolis By David Hugill (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021. Pp. vii, 212. Notes, bibliography, index. Clothbound, $100.00; paperbound, $25.00.) Settler Colonial City is a highly accessible book with a broad sweep that shifts geographic scales from the most localized neighborhood level out to the (perhaps unexpected) global frame of American capitalism and military power. In one substantive introduction and four subsequent chapters, it offers the reader a concise journey. It toggles between attention to the impacts imposed upon Indigenous peoples in what is currently called Minnesota (starting with historic and ongoing modes of colonization) and attention to the settler colonial ontologies and practices that form the cultural and material landscapes of the city of Minneapolis. The book offers nuanced historical and ethnographic detail while maintaining an important emphasis on systemic relations and the structures of dominance and inequality. The first chapters hone [End Page 204] in on the Phillips neighborhood, to provide wider explanatory frames for understanding its formation and its (Indigenous) demographics and movements. While the book attends deeply to Indigenous communities' experiences in Minneapolis—a centering point for the work—the primary focus is charting the modes of structured dominance that have created those experiences, with an emphasis on the continued production of racialized and colonial relations. Thus, the second chapter takes on liberal anti-racism efforts, in order to illustrate how easily such political and philanthropic positionings stay firmly nested within settler colonial epistemologies and capitalist envelopes. Again, as the author indicates, this is primarily a work that studies settler colonialism. Chapter three takes on the highly topical subject of policing to reveal the longstanding productions of Indigenous criminality, immorality, and incapacity that feed police violence. It shares how Indigenous and other groups resisted policing behaviors and structures through activism and community organizing. The final chapter begins locally, within a community-responsive job site aimed at Indigenous employment, before zooming outward to show that site's direct and messy intertwining with American global empire and the war industry. Most impactfully, Hugill uses this example to warn readers not to separate notions of diversity (or, its uncritical celebration) from larger systems of exploitation and violence. He instead highlights the need to attend carefully and continually with the social contradictions of any self-styled liberal or cosmopolitan city, like Minneapolis. Hugill's primary goal is to wipe away the social, cultural, and political obfuscations that continually distance settler colonialism from cities and from the contemporary conditions of life for most Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. The book provides many powerful descriptions of how and why "urbanization and settler colonization are linked," and how these are structured continuously to produce unequal outcomes that favor non-Indigenous, largely white, settlers (p. 19). As an intervention, Hugill successfully maps out those intersections and the persistent and foundational interdependencies between settler colonial discourse, economics, geographies, racialization, liberalism, and Indigeneity. His model should be a primer for anyone seeking to understand the concepts of systemic or institutional racism, whiteness, and the structures of both nation-making and urbanization. This book could also be invaluable to those interested in new ways of looking at a state like Indiana. While this text focuses squarely on Minneapolis, Hugill's model of analysis could easily be applied to [End Page 205] Indianapolis. Settler Colonial City helps to show how such spaces are fundamentally interconnected and integrated into regional, national, and global networks (and vice versa), and how they continue to be quieted spaces of production for both direct and submerged violences. The attention this book pays to the role and function of such midwestern spaces bolsters scholars' options for useful methodologies and marks the urgency of enhancing work such as Settler City Limits: Indigenous Resurgence and Colonial Violence in the Urban Prairie West (2019) or Indian Cities: Histories of Indigenous Urbanization (2022). [End Page 206] Natchee Blu Barnd Oregon State University Copyright © 2023 Trustees of Indiana University