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A review by elizabethlk
Urban Tribes: Native Americans in the City by Lisa Charleyboy, Mary Beth Leatherdale
4.0
I found Urban Tribes displayed on the shelf at my local library, the beautiful cover art standing out to me. I picked it up knowing that it would be the book I needed to read when I was much younger, and I was definitely right in that.
Urban Tribes is a beautifully put together work. It features interviews, essays, poetry, art, tweets from people in the aboriginal communities in the United States and Canada who reside in cities. It powerfully displays indigenous cultures in a modern light, and shatters common misconceptions about the First Nations communities. It also serves as a wonderful introduction to public organizations, musicians, bloggers, actors, and so on. I've already listened to (and thoroughly enjoyed) two musicians featured within Urban Tribes.
When I was a little girl, I fit into the very obviously white category of people who were under the impression that aboriginals in North America are a thing of the past. My education, culture, and physical surroundings in a rural and predominantly white community allowed for this. Even when a native girl moved to the area and was in my class, it still seemed more to me like she was celebrating her ancestry the way my white classmates celebrated their European ancestry, rather than celebrating her culture as a present and living part of her identity. It wasn't until I was a teenager that I really fully understood that not only did natives exist in a modern context, but that many of them lived a modern life the way I did, and simply had different culture, tradition, life experiences, etc from me. I feel like this book is something I should have had in middle school (it was not yet written at that time, to be clear), so that I could have sooner developed that broader sense of the people living in my own country.
I would definitely recommend this book. It is a wonderful view of an often ignored type of experience, it was a great introduction to some folks in the public eye that my attention had not been drawn to yet, and it is educational in a way that is easy to read without being condescending.
Urban Tribes is a beautifully put together work. It features interviews, essays, poetry, art, tweets from people in the aboriginal communities in the United States and Canada who reside in cities. It powerfully displays indigenous cultures in a modern light, and shatters common misconceptions about the First Nations communities. It also serves as a wonderful introduction to public organizations, musicians, bloggers, actors, and so on. I've already listened to (and thoroughly enjoyed) two musicians featured within Urban Tribes.
When I was a little girl, I fit into the very obviously white category of people who were under the impression that aboriginals in North America are a thing of the past. My education, culture, and physical surroundings in a rural and predominantly white community allowed for this. Even when a native girl moved to the area and was in my class, it still seemed more to me like she was celebrating her ancestry the way my white classmates celebrated their European ancestry, rather than celebrating her culture as a present and living part of her identity. It wasn't until I was a teenager that I really fully understood that not only did natives exist in a modern context, but that many of them lived a modern life the way I did, and simply had different culture, tradition, life experiences, etc from me. I feel like this book is something I should have had in middle school (it was not yet written at that time, to be clear), so that I could have sooner developed that broader sense of the people living in my own country.
I would definitely recommend this book. It is a wonderful view of an often ignored type of experience, it was a great introduction to some folks in the public eye that my attention had not been drawn to yet, and it is educational in a way that is easy to read without being condescending.