Oklahoma is bound to both the South and the Southwest and their legacies of conquest and Indigenous survivance. At the same time, mobility, ingenuity, cultural exchange, and creative expression—all part of the experience of urbanization—have been fundamental to people of the tribes that call this place home. Tulsa, New Orleans, and Santa Fe, with their importance in histories of geopolitical upheaval and mobility that shaped the establishment of the United States, are key to uncovering the history of urbanization experienced by Native Americans from Oklahoma. Urban Homelands, while examining the overlooked histories of Oklahoma Indigenous urbanization relative to these regions, engages literature and film as not just mirrors of experience but as producers of it. Lindsey Claire Smith brings the work of three-time poet laureate Joy Harjo into conversation with the great Cherokee playwright Lynn Riggs and breakout filmmaker Sterlin Harjo. Flying in the face of civic landmarks and settler histories that at once obscure Native origins and appropriate Native culture for tourism, this creative reclaiming of Indigenous cities points toward the productive possibilities of recognizing untold urban histories and the creative relationships with urban space itself.  

Responding to the recent indigenous turn in American studies, the essays in this volume inform discussion about indigeneity, race, gender, modernity, nation, state power, and globalization in interdisciplinary and broadly comparative global ways.

Organized into three thematic sections--Spaces of the Pacific, "Unexpected Indigenous" Modernity, and Nation and Nation-State-- "Alternative Contact" reveals how Native American studies and empowerment movements in the 1960s and 1970s decentered paradigms of Native American-European "first contact." Among other kinds of contact, the contributors also imagine alternative connections between indigenous and American studies.

The subject of United States military and government hegemony has long overshadowed discussions of contact with peoples of other origins. The articles in this volume explore transnational and cross-ethnic exchanges among indigenous peoples of the Americas, including the Caribbean and Pacific Islands. Such moments of alternative contact complicate and enrich our understanding of the links between sovereignty, racial formation, and U.S. colonial and imperial projects. Ultimately, "Alternative Contact" theorizes a more dynamic indigeneity that articulates new or overlooked connections among peoples, histories, cultures, and critical discourses within a global context.