Little Earth Housing Complex: American Indian Resilience, Resistance, and Responsibility in Minneapolis

• In Event: Staking Claims: Race, Space, and (Re)Settlement in Minneapolis and Detroit

Abstract

In this paper, I examine the Little Earth housing complex in Minneapolis as a Native led response to the federal Indian policy of Relocation, which sought to relocate Indian people from reservations and towards urban centers, to underscore the resiliency of urban Indians in the city. Further, I contend the long-term American Indian management of Little Earth demonstrates the resistance of this community in their efforts to push back against totalizing federal housing policies aimed at dispossession, displacement, and containment. When Little Earth opened its doors in 1973 its goal was to house and serve the urban American Indian community, providing human services, education, and economic opportunities and programs for its residents. Initially funded and managed by the Minnesota Council of Churches and the St. Paul-Minneapolis Archdiocese, Little Earth rapidly faltered under the mismanagement and altruism of the church based owner-sponsors who lacked the required business savvy and cultural competence among the Native residents to successfully administer the housing program. Almost immediately the national office of the American Indian Movement (AIM) intervened and assumed responsibility for Little Earth to save the housing complex from foreclosure. In this paper, my focus on Little Earth as an Indian preference housing project bookended by the 1965 creation of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the 1988 Indian Housing Act which placed “responsibility” for American Indian housing needs under the broad scope of HUD. I critique the federal government’s extensive bureaucracy for American Indian people, here spanning the Department of Interior where the Bureau of Indian Affairs is located and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, where Public and Indian Housing is located. These layers of government oversight, and administrative separation, create very real barriers to urban Indian’s access to off-reservation affordable housing. In this way, I argue, the federal government is able to prevent resources from reaching off-reservation Indians in Minneapolis through its designation of Little Earth as a “non-tribal” entity. As such, Little Earth is not able to access housing funds that are specifically earmarked for American Indian people under HUD. This is significant because the same political moment witnessed the growth of Native political activism through AIM and Indian survival schools across the nation, region, and locally in the Twin Cities to fight for Indian rights, housing, and culturally relevant education – something Little Earth strives to provide. Remarkably, and despite these barriers, Little Earth continues to be the only American Indian preference section 8 rental program in the country. Over 98 percent of Little Earth’s residents are American Indian. Yet Little Earth is a non-profit organization, often struggling to maintain and acquire adequate funding to maintain its facilities and programming, largely geared towards educating and supporting Native youth. I historicize Little Earth, as a housing program, an act of dissent, and argue that Little Earth was envisioned by urban Indians in Minneapolis, and continues to be imagined, as an alternative to more mainstream housing programs, a place where culture and capitalism intersect and in many ways, collide.

Author

• Kasey Keeler