Native Providence

Native Providence reveals stories of Native urban life in Providence, Rhode Island, shaped by the dynamics of colonialism, race, and class and not least by the survivance of people who today live among the ruins of modernity.

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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 the stories of the city’s Native residents 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, or lived in Providence briefly, who faced involuntary displacement by urban renewal, and who made their presence known in this city and in the wider Indigenous and settler-colonial worlds. Their everyday experiences reenvision Providence’s past and illuminate documentary and spatial tactics of inequality that erased Native people from most nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history.