Indigenous Albuquerque

Some 30,000 American Indians call Albuquerque, New Mexico, home, and twelve Indigenous nations, mostly Pueblo, live within a fifty-mile radius of it. Yet no study until now has focused on the complexities of urban American Indian experience in the state’s largest city. Indigenous Albuquerque examines the dilemmas confronting urban Indians as a result of a colonized past—and present—and the relationship between the City of Albuquerque and its Native residents. Treating not only issues of identity but also education, welfare, health care, community organizations, and community efforts to counter colonization, Myla Vicenti Carpio explores every aspect of Indigenous life in the city. “Urban” as a lived experience, she suggests, does not occur in isolation from either Indigenous communities’ survival or the legacies of Euroamerican colonization. This experience is integrally connected not only through cultural, religious, political, and economic spheres, but also through the legacy of federal reservation police, and thus cannot be understood as distinct from reservation life. By specifically considering the intersection of city and citizen, Vicenti Carpio expresses the dilemmas confronting urban Indians as a result of their colonized past. While Indigenous Albuquerque reflects the discipline of American Indian Studies, it is also relevant to American Indian history, ethnic studies, public policy, and urban history.