AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 35, No. 2, pp. 2053–2057. ISSN 0094–0496, eISSN 1548–1425. © 2008 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.

Reprint information can be found at https://caesar.sheridan.com/reprints/redir.php?pub=10089&acro=AMET.

Native Hubs: Culture, Community and Belonging in the Silicon Valley and Beyond. Renya K. Ramirez. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. 273 pp.

AUDRA SIMPSONCornell University

Native Hubs: Culture, Community and Belonging in the Silicon Valley and Beyond is an

ethnographic examination of Indigenous transnationalism that will redefine the anthropology of

Native North America. Most centrally, the feminist and transnational analytics and community-

driven theorizing that Ramirez brings to her engagement with the actions of “urban Indians”

upsets the premise of fixity and containment that underpin and, thus, permeate representations

and cultural analyses of all Native Americans (Deloria 2004). Imagined through the sparse

literature written on them as pathologized, deterritorialized, and contained within a failed

assimilation project, Indians in cities have been defined by their placelessness rather than their

place. As such, Indians have not been imagined to be part of a politics that is evident or mobile,

let alone are they imagined to be part of larger, Indigenous, and national configurations, such as

tribal polities. Their containment solely within the category of “urban” endures in spite of their

historical activism and their attachments and political refashioning of places of meaning, places

that may be located within or without or beyond reservations.

An antidote to this conceptual miring is Ramirez’s book and the concept of “hub.” The

notion of “hub” is a gendered, “conceptual frame of mobility” (p. 200) that forms the theoretical,

ethnographic, imagistic, and methodological core of her study and constitutes the process by

which her Indigenous interlocutors merge and reemerge in social and political concerts of

familiarity. Ramirez attributes the hub to LaVerne Roberts, a Paiute activist in the Silicon Valley

who theorized the places and homes of Indigenous peoples as sites of activity, as moments of

sustained sociality and intragroup recognition. Deploying Roberts’s concept, Ramirez illustrates

that hubs may be institutions, movements, or constitutive of moments and of peoples. “Hubs” are

generative spaces of sociality, politics, and “place making” that fashion discursive and recursive

links to home through action.

By taking up this concept for her analysis Ramirez is able to frame and unframe

Indigenous action within spheres that are both public and private and in doing so, topples

binaries that have governed Indigenous action and politics in North America as either on or off

reserve, official–unofficial, recognized-unrecognized. She deploys and critiques literature within

citizenship studies that premise the public (and masculine) political actor as the modal (and

model) citizen at the expense of (the feminine) women, whose actions we see in this study reside

in public and private spheres. Ramirez achieves this ethnographically informed critique by

expanding her field to individual and collective peoples, appearing in a social and political

specificity that is refreshing and unusual in Indigenous studies: cross-border Mixtecs, Navajos,

Paiutes, elected leaders, youth, and Muwekma Ohlone peoples in California.

Ramirez focuses on their vernacular understandings and practices of political aspiration

and belonging for “full membership” in whatever society they strive for belonging within and

belonging to. She historicizes the temporal construction of each person and group that she works

with so that we are offered autobiography, macrohistories of treaty making in California,

narratives of border crossings to and from San Diego, political organizing among El Frente.

These groups and institutions are not disparate or diffuse, they converge with the histories and

aspirations that they delineate for us. Thus, the Mixtec are not decontextualized migrants; they

organize politically, they have deeply specified histories, and they move between the spaces of

fixity and movement that govern understandings of them. And in this analysis they move against

categorizations of them as (decontextualized) “urban Indians,” as insular, strangely without a

politics of association with other Indigenous peoples, as bereft of political vision or agency.

The aspirational premise of the interlocutors within study rest on of a notion of

“belonging” and a concomitant desire for recognition (in various forms). In this, it as if there

were a shared political good that all interlocutors strive for, with accordant rights for

membership within multilayered nations (tribal–federal). Her study is concerned with those who

want to belong, who are deeply committed to reformation of existing structures, rather than those

who wish to stay apart or dismantle those structures. Native Hubs may therefore be read as a

neoclassic multicultural text, affirming the desire for recognition as well as the value of cultural

difference in meting out that recognition. For example, in her excellent mapping and

historicization of Chicano–Mixtec and Native American polities in the Southwest and California

(ch. 5), we see that the Mixtec she is concerned with are unrecognizable (and, thence,

unclaimable) by Chicanos because they do not speak Spanish; further, they may seem

unrecognizable to North American Indigenous peoples because they are federally unrecognized

(cf. pp. 140–144). Ramirez describes these political disarticulations between peoples as a

symptom of a deeper need, the need for more for more dialogue among these groups, dialogue

that will undo oppressive notions of homogeneity and authenticity and make the experience of

transnationalism matter. In her analysis, she argues that “more comparative work between racial

and ethnic communities is greatly needed” (p. 143).

This book is clearly a contribution to this urgently needed comparative work and

dialogue. But some might argue that this multicultural antidote does not assuage the deeper issue

of Indigenous sovereignty issues within North America. Indian claims to sovereignty and self-

determination are more often than not based on notions of first occupancy, or aboriginality, and

are profound political issues that will not be adjudicated through conversations regarding the

value of identity or culture. Critics of multiculturalism might find these conversations between

groups to be a paltry solution to the deeper problem of settler colonialism itself, a succession in

North America of further occupancies and misunderstandings, whether those occupancies be by

comparatively ethnic, subaltern, or “minoritized” peoples or not. Nonetheless, Ramirez has

moved her ethnography into this fraught space of competing claims in a model way. This is a

minor point regarding telos of multiculturalism in settler contexts. Because a good part of the

historical and ethnographic attention that Ramirez pays to each hub maker involves a recounting

of sociological–autobiographic–historical registers of exclusions wrought by North American

settler projects and indigenous complicities in those projects, moments, and contradictions

(which Ramirez maps out with great care and depth), there is a pointing to the possibility of

deeply alternative political ontologies. It is because North American settler colonialism is

mapped out so convincingly that critical questions regarding multiculturalism might emerge (ch.

4 is especially strong in this regard).

Further, Ramirez’s ethnography and analysis focus on the political subjectivity of her

interlocutors and does so in ways that point repeatedly to and then beyond those structures and

processes of differentiation and social value that they paradoxically desire recognition from. For

example, the careful attention to excluding logics of the border defining the United States from

Mexico is accounted for, but in her analysis it does not form the conceptual center of Indigenous

identity making.

Clearly Ramirez has demapped and mapped an area of inquiry for future scholars. This

book will be of interest to those engaged with questions of indigeneity, settler colonialism,

gender, political recognition, and historical and contemporary cases of transnationalism. Native

Hubs will be of particular interest to those engaged with histories found within (and moving

outside of) California. In short, Ramirez has written a “breakout” book in the anthropology of

Native North America for the analytics and ethnography that it works with and the terrain that it

covers, uncovers, and strives for.

Reference cited

Deloria, Phil

2004 Indians in Unexpected Places. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.