Aboriginal Peoples in Canadian Cities

Since the 1970's, Aboriginal people have been more likely to live in Canadian cities than on reserves or in rural areas. Aboriginal rural-tourban migration and the development of urban Aboriginal communities represent two of the most significant shifts in the histories and cultures of Aboriginal peoples in Canada. The essays in Aboriginal Peoples in Canadian Cities: Transformations and Continuities are from contributors directly engaged in urban Aboriginal communities; they draw on extensive ethnographic research on and by Aboriginal people and their own lived experiences.

The interdisciplinary studies of urban Aboriginal community and identity collected in this volume offer narratives of unique experiences and aspects of urban Aboriginal life. They provide innovative perspectives on cultural transformation and continuity, and they demonstrate how comparative examinations of the diversity within and across urban Aboriginal experiences contribute to broader understandings of the relationship between Aboriginal peoples and the Canadian state as well as to theoretical debates about power dynamics in the production of community and in processes of identity formation.

Heather A. Howard is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Michigan State University and is affiliated faculty with the Centre for Aboriginal Initiatives at the University of Toronto. She co-edited, with Rae Bridgman and Sally Cole, Feminist Fields: Ethnographic Insights (1999) and, with Susan Applegate Krouse, Keeping the Campfires Going: Native Women's Activism in Urban Areas (2009).

Craig Proulx is an associate professor in anthropology at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick. In 2003 he published Reclaiming Aboriginal Justice, Community, and Identity, which discussed the Community Council Project, an Aboriginal-run diversion project in Toronto, Ontario. His current research is in the realm of media representations of Aboriginal peoples in Canada.