Beyond the White Picket Fence: American Indians, Suburbanization, and Homeownership

This article brings together diverse fields, research methods, and sources to define suburban American Indians in relation to place, identity, and homeownership. With Minnesota and the suburbs of the Twin Cities as a focal point and case study, the author centers the rich, scholarly field of Native American and Indigenous studies to draw attention to suburban Indians as a growing and unique subgroup of American Indians. Though inherently humanistic in nature and drawing on auto-ethnography and oral history, this work draws on select quantitative sources to better understand suburban Indians, particularly in terms of homeownership. In doing so, this article adds to and advances scholarship on off-reservation Indians and highlights the role of homeownership as a draw to more suburban areas. This article sets the stage for a new line of inquiry that centers contemporary American Indian people in suburbs by offering a lens through which to analyze American Indian people who do not fit into the neat, yet dated, categories of on- and off-reservation Indians.