Native Hubs: Culture, Community, and Belonging in Silicon Valley and Beyond

by Renya K. Ramirez

Most Native Americans in the United States live in cities, where many find themselves caught in a bind, neither afforded the full rights granted U.S. citizens nor allowed full access to the tribal programs and resources—particularly health care services—provided to Native Americans living on reservations. A scholar and a member of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, Renya K. Ramirez investigates how urban Native Americans negotiate what she argues is, in effect, a transnational existence. Through an ethnographic account of the Native American community in California’s Silicon Valley and beyond, Ramirez explores the ways that urban Indians have pressed their tribes, local institutions, and the federal government to expand conventional notions of citizenship. Ramirez’s ethnography revolves around the Paiute American activist Laverne Roberts’s notion of the “hub,” a space that allows for the creation of a sense of belonging away from a geographic center. Ramirez describes “hub-making” activities in Silicon Valley, including sweat lodge ceremonies, powwows, and American Indian Alliance meetings, gatherings at which urban Indians reinforce bonds of social belonging and forge intertribal alliances. She examines the struggle of the Muwekma Ohlone, a tribe aboriginal to the San Francisco Bay area, to maintain a sense of community without a land base and to be recognized as a tribe by the federal government. She considers the crucial role of Native women within urban indigenous communities; a 2004 meeting in which Native Americans from Mexico and the United States discussed cross-border indigenous rights activism; and the ways that young Native Americans in Silicon Valley experience race and ethnicity, especially in relation to the area’s large Chicano community. A unique and important exploration of diaspora, transnationalism, identity, belonging, and community, Native Hubs is intended for scholars and activists alike.

Genres: Indigenous, Nonfiction, School

288 pages, Paperback

First published June 18, 2007

Reviews

[Allicia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I completely agree on the Native Diaspora concept and the transnationalism felt by natives. I also liked many of the insights that the interviewees stated. My favorite chapters were the last two, but the overall book is excellent and I would recommend many people to read this. Thanks Lloyd for lending it to me.

[molly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Renya Ramirez is a professor at UC Santa Cruz, and was rushed to publish this book to get tenure, and is a theoretical intervention as well as an on-the-ground intervention. I think she does a really amazing job explaining incredible complex theories and ideas in ways that are very forth-coming and easy to understand. In this book, she focuses on Native American community healing from colonialism & community decolonization in the Silicon Valley, in hopes to create a community about supporting and creating alliances to make real social change. Throughout this book she raises invaluable questions that interrogate the relationship you have to the people you are writing/researching about.

[Lloyd · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a well-written and enlightening book. It tells the stories of contemporary urban Native people working to create 'native hubs' to maintain their worldview and identity. It's great to read how contemporary Native people are doing that in the 21st century. I recommend it a great deal!