Buying Homelands: American Indian Land, Consumption, and Identity

This event has passed.

Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, Room L160
@ 3:30 pm - 5:00 pm

A “private property” sign sits in front of property owned by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s home on the island of Kauai; Pacific Ocean in the background.
Photograph by: Dennis Fujimoto. The Guardian.

Kasey Keeler

Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity Fellow (2021-2022)

Tuolumne Me-Wuk & Citizen Potawatomi; Assistant Professor Civil Society & Community Studies (SoHE) and American Indian Studies (L&S)
UW–Madison

The United States is built on the dispossession of Native land. Native land has been transformed, exchanged, contained, degraded, bought, and sold during the four-hundred years of colonialism across North America. Yet, Native community members and tribal nations, who have worked to play an active and important role in contemporary land transactions, are often prohibited from purchasing homelands due to high costs. At the same time, the public consumption of Native homelands by non-Natives has become increasingly visible and normalized through television and in popular culture. This can be seen through the purchase of Native land in place like Alaska, Hawaii, Montana, and Idaho by wealthy white Americans for “homesteads,” second homes, and vacation homes. Bringing together archival research, land records, popular culture, and oral interviews, Buying Homelands makes two major interventions. First, I connect the long history of American Indian dispossession to the innovative ways Native people use land, as capital, to resist settler colonialism today. Second, Buying Homelands interrogates the ease of non-Natives who purchase homelands that have otherwise been “off limits” to Native communities due to high purchase prices. Throughout this project, I interrogate what it means to be dispossessed of land, yet purchase land; what it means to be houseless on traditional land; and the ways settler nostalgia for home/homelands are represented in popular culture. In doing so, I question the meaning of home/homelands for both Native community members and those who advance settler colonialism contemporarily. This talk offers an overview of my book project and the ways I’m thinking through public consumption of Native land by examining popular reality and home buying TV shows.

Kasey Keeler (Tuolumne Me-Wuk and Citizen Potawatomi), Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin, holds a joint appointment in the American Indian Studies Program and the Department of Civil Society and Community Studies. Kasey’s first book, American Indians and the American Dream: People, Place, and Property in Minnesota is forthcoming with the University of Minnesota Press. In her research, Kasey centers the field of Native American and Indigenous Studies through a focus on federal Indian policy, land policy, housing and home ownership, histories of place and placemaking, American Indian sub/urbanization, and popular culture.