Kyle T. Mays - City of Dispossessions: Indigenous Peoples, African Americans, and the Creation of Modern Detroit

Over the years, I have given dozens of talks on my research for this book. The audiences and venues have varied from academic conferences to bars to my auntie in her living room. When speaking to academic audiences, I begin by acknowledging my great-grandmother, Esther Mays, and my aunt Judy Mays, and their roles in shaping cultural and educational history in postwar Detroit. Then I ask the audience, What do you know about Detroit? I implore them to yell things out at me; predictable answers emerge. Someone will shout out Motown!; another will say the Bankruptcy; a person hip to Detroits radical Black history will proclaim the Rebellion! Then someone will shout, Factories! Cars! I usually have to follow up, reminding them of Detroits great sports history, making sure that they acknowledge the Detroit Pistons, the team, led by Isiah Zeke Thomas, that went 31 against Michael Jordans Chicago Bulls. The audience will usually laugh, perhaps reminiscing about those 1980s Bad Boys, including Dennis Rodman, John Salley, Bill Laimbeer, Rick Mahorn, Vinnie the Microwave Johnson, Mark Aguirre, and Joe Dumars beating Jordans Bulls, and knocking him to the ground. Similar to the erasure of the Pistons as one of the great basketball teams in NBA history, what audiences also dont mention is the Indigenous people who also made the city. Detroit has a long Indigenous history and a continuing Indigenous presence, with representations everywhere in the city. The Pontiac brand, for example, is named after the Odawa chief, Pontiac. Although there are numerous other examples at the Detroit Historical Museum and at the Detroit Public Library, this history has been neglected.

The Indigenous histories of modern Detroit remain invisible for a host of cultural and political reasons. My aim in this book is to unpack why this happened and to reconstruct this history, offering examples of Indigenous history and Black history and their presence in Detroit from the late nineteenth century to the present. My aim is not to write a long, boring history book. This book is not a tribal history; I am not interested in proving how many Indigenous people live in Detroit and how theyre going to decolonize everything today. My aim is to encourage the reader to think long and hard about their local place, especially urban spaces, and how the Indigenous people in that area are recognized or not recognizedor, worse, erased.

I first decided to write about Detroits Indigenous history as an undergraduate at James Madison College, which was not necessarily a haven for first-year students, especially students of color, on the campus of Michigan State University. While I gained a great deal of knowledge there, the experience was still challenging because several Black students and I believed the campus was hostile to Black people, and we protested. I learned from my experience to delve deeply into something and always figure out how to reconstruct history from below.

Though my family, Saginaw Chippewa, came to Detroit in 1940, writing about them was not on my intellectual radar. But Gitchi-Manidoo (the Great Spirit) works in mysterious ways. On a cold, January day in 2006and I mean Michigan coldI attended my first day of class in Native American history, taught by Anishinaabe professor George Cornell. He had a reputation on campus as a tough grader, one who would never bend for students. As a cocky nineteen-year-old, I was determined not to be intimidated. I went to class, sat down in the front with a hoodie on, and cocked my head back, ready for the intellectual battle. He went over the syllabus and basically told us that we would have to unlearn U.S. history. Twenty minutes later, he dismissed the class. A line of students quickly formed in front of Dr. Cornell so that students could discuss matters related to the class, while I tried to sneak out the back door.

As I was leaving, Dr. Cornell stopped me and said, Mays! Damn, I thought, what does he want? I went up to him, with the annoyed look of a sophomore undergraduate student, repelled at unwarranted conversation with a professor. He shook my hand, the way a tall, dignified Indigenous uncle would, and said, in a deep voice, I know your whole family! I used to work with your grandmother on Indian policies and activism back in the day!

Oh, thats cool, I replied, feigning interest.

She was great. She didnt take shit from nobody, he stated glowingly.

I left that day with deep respect for Dr. Cornell. After all, most of the Indigenous men I knew or heard about from back in the day took all of the credit, ignoring the contributions of Indigenous women. I walked back into that cold, grey Michigan winter day, full of intellectual vigor. In retrospect, my intellectual destinyto honor my family, to honor my great-grandmother, and to honor Detroits Indigenous communitywas forever set.

After finishing my undergraduate degree, I began to pursue a doctorate in the African American and African Studies Program at Michigan State. I had plans to write a dissertation on the relationship between Black and Indigenous activists in the Red and Black Power Movements. After a year, I became disillusioned with my ability to do the comparison well. I wanted and needed to learn more about Black and Indigenous relations, and I wasnt necessarily able to do that there. I found another intellectual path, however, in the form of a book I discovered online about Detroits Native American History: Emund Danzigers