Kent-Stoll, Peter. 2025. “Struggles for the Land and the City: Settler Colonialism, Anticolonialism, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs Urban Relocation Program in Chicago.” Critical Sociology doi:10.1177/08969205251385844.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs Urban Relocation program relocated thousands of Native Americans to Chicago and other cities from the early 1950s through the early 1970s. Despite BIA claims of social and economic progress, Native people faced exploitative social, political, and material conditions in the city. This article examines how the BIA envisioned and managed relocation in Chicago and how Native people challenged the BIA’s expectations and desires. Urban sociological and urban historical literature on the postwar U.S. is not well positioned to answer these questions, given its minimal engagement with histories of U.S. settler colonialism and urban Indigenous experiences. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives on settler colonial urbanisms and urban indigeneity, I uncover how the BIA imagined Chicago as a modern city disconnected from indigeneity, and how relocated Native people formed the Chicago Indian Village movement to fight for land back while building space and community in resistance to dispossession.
*2025 American Sociological Association Comparative-Historical Sociology Section Richard Bendix Student Paper Award
Through the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) relocation program starting in 1952, the United States sought to terminate federal trust restrictions for American Indians and while relocating reservation and rural-residing Indigenous people to cities to be assimilated into the American “mainstream.” I analyze the BIA’s program as part of the specifically settler colonial structure of the U.S. state. Using primary and secondary sources, I ask what explains the BIA’s shifting spatial strategies and imaginaries from the rise of the relocation program to its demise? The BIA’s project derided reservations as fiscal burdens, depicted the postwar city as a place of “Indian freedom,” engaged in gendered surveillance of Indigenous families, and negated Indigenous peoples’ histories in U.S. cities. As the program ended, the BIA shifted rhetoric from assimilation to self-determination to maintain the settler colonial relation while paying lip service to critiques of the colonial tactics of relocation. These different moments of the relocation project articulated a type of dispossessory citizenship as a racial and empire state strategy of enacting and justifying settler colonialism. This work analyzes the settler colonial dimensions of the state and its technologies of violence and territory used when it presents itself as supposedly moving past its colonial past.
Kent‐Stoll, Peter. 2020. “The Racial and Colonial Dimensions of Gentrification.” Sociology Compass 14 (12): e12838. doi: 10.1111/soc4.12838
In recent years, studies of gentrification have added a deeper political economic, political, and cultural understanding to this process by demonstrating how it can be understood as not only driven by the physical displacement of working-class residents but also by the political, cultural, and physical displacement of poor and working-class Black, Latinx, Asian, and Indigenous populations. In this study, I review these recent key works in urban sociology, geography, and urban history which examine the specifically racial and colonial dimensions of gentrification. These works provide invaluable insights to the political economic, political, and cultural dimensions of gentrification, but are still constrained by not developing a deeper historical analytics of the racial and colonial structures which shape gentrification. Because of this, the foundations of anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism which make possible the commodification of space and devaluation and dispossession of people that gentrification requires, remain obscured. I argue the alternative frameworks of settler colonialism, internal colonialism, and coloniality—developed largely separate from urban sociology—can provide a sharper analysis to the study of gentrification by helping to more explicitly name and explain the racial and colonial structures, logics, and subjectivities which shape gentrification.