Native Hubs

“Native Hubs should start a much longer conversation about Native people and the vast networks that have developed over time, linking tribal lands with cities.” - Nicolas G. Rosenthal, Pacific Historical Review

“[Native Hubs] will be of interest to those engaged with questions of indigeneity, settler colonialism, gender, political recognition, and historical and contemporary cases of transnationalism. Native Hubs will be of particular interest to those engaged with histories found within (and moving outside of) California. In short, Ramirez has written a ‘breakout’ book in the anthropology of Native North America for the analytics and ethnography that it works with and the terrain that it covers, uncovers, and strives for.” - Audra Simpson, American Ethnologist

“The first book-length anthropological treatment of the very different Native groups co-habiting urban California places and spaces in the early twenty-first century. . . . An interesting and important contribution.” - Journal of Anthropological Research

“As a woman of Winnebago, Ojibwe, and white ancestry who was raised in Silicon Valley, Ramirez thoughtfully negotiates her social position as a scholar in her own community. By incorporating her field notes and long slices of narrative into her text, Ramirez employs a polyvocal methodology that emphasizes human agency.” - Alison Fields, Ethnohistory

“In the end, Ramirez’s conceptualization extends the understanding of urban Native Americans, not as a vanishing, beaten people without culture and homeland but as a vibrant, animating force in the urban milieu.” - G. H. Grandbois, American Indian Culture and Research Journal

“Ramirez’s work on urban natives . . . adds an important and original dimension to theoretical frameworks for understanding urban cultural groups. . . . [T]his book has strengths that should attract scholars from a variety of disciplines.” - Evelyn J. Peters, Progress in Human Geography

“This welcome, innovative ethnographic study examines the Indian perspective on the experiences of Indians living in Northern California’s Silicon Valley. Unlike most population group studies, this is a poignant, heartfelt, intuitive study that does not reduce the people being studied to faceless, nameless subjects . . . . Historians, sociologists, and ethnographers will be attracted to this study, though due to the compelling content as well as the author’s unique ability to communicate complex ideas in a manner that is easily understood, public libraries should also consider this book for their collections. Highly recommended.” - T. Maxwell-Long, Choice

“Renya K. Ramirez makes compelling use of ethnographic interviews to explore broad issues of cultural citizenship and transnational migration. Her analysis of Laverne Roberts’s notion of ‘hubs’ connecting Native people across time and space is a significant contribution to the all too sparse scholarship on urban American Indian communities.” - Susan Applegate Krouse, Director of the American Indian Studies Program, Michigan State University