Members of the urban Indian community in Detroit, Michigan, at the Kids Christmas Party in December 2014. Photo from North American Indian Association of Detroit / Facebook
More than 8,000 Native Americans live in Wayne County in Michigan and Kyle Mays (Saginaw Chippewa / African-American) wonders whether they are being left out of discussions about the rebirth of Detroit:
Detroit is a cold, stark place. And depending on where you are in the city, it can be gloomy even on the brightest spring or summer days. The narratives written and said about Detroit probably impact my vision of the city as well. A former arsenal of democracy, it is now engrossed in urban decline narratives, a shrinking city (in infrastructure and population), and a place of extreme inner-city poverty; it is a dangerous place. For others, especially the wealthy, it is a frontier land of possibility -- a place full of potential for creative artists and hipsters. Dan Gilbert, Owner of Quicken Loans and the Cleveland Cavaliers is such an example, using rhetoric like Detroit 2.0 to bring young hipsters into the city. Yet, others, like L. Brooks Patterson, see it as a dangerous place. On January 27, 2014, Paige Williams, a writer for The New Yorker published a scathing article of long time Oakland County Chief Executive, L. Brooks Patterson. Titled, “Drop Dead Detroit!” the article was a critique of Patterson, a major critic of all things Detroit, even as he sits as an outsider in one of the wealthiest counties in the United States—vanilla suburbs surrounding a chocolate city. Williams accused Patterson of racism. It is easy to see why. Patterson, speaking about Detroit stated, “Anytime I talk about Detroit, it will not be positive. Therefore, I’m called a Detroit basher. The truth hurts, you know? Tough shit.” He even told his daughters not to get gas there. If kicking a struggling city down, whose residents happen to be majority Black was not enough, he brought Native Americans into the conversation. When asked how he would fix the financial problems of Detroit, he said, “what we’re gonna do is turn Detroit into an Indian reservation, where we herd all the Indians into the city, build a fence around it, and then throw in the blankets and corn.” Apparently these comments happened long ago, though the place of Indian people in the white imagination suggests that Patterson could have made this statement just as easily in 2014 as in 1974.Get the Story:
Kyle T. Mays: Do Natives Have a Future in Detroit? (Indian Country Today 9/19)
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