East Baltimore Church of God ca. 1960s, a church founded by Lumbee Indians in the City of Baltimore, original photo courtesy Rev. Robert E. Dodson Jr., colorization by Katie Lively, 2021.
Repatriating the Archives: An Urban Reservation Reunion
The place now known as Baltimore, like the rest of what is now known as the United States of America, has always been home to Native peoples. Baltimore is part of the ancestral homelands of the Piscataway and the Susquehannock, and a diverse host of American Indian folks from many nations have passed through or lived here at different times, and still do. In the mid-twentieth century, thousands of Lumbee Indians and members of other tribal nations migrated to Baltimore City, seeking jobs and a better quality of life. On the east side of town, they created a vibrant, intertribal American Indian community, which they affectionately referred to as their "reservation." In the decades since, due to a complex set of factors ranging from upward mobility, to Urban Renewal, to gentrification, most American Indian people moved away from the area, which continues to transform. In collaboration with her elders, Ashley Minner has been mining archives to repatriate their heritage and reconstruct East Baltimore's "reservation." She sees this as an urgent project of reclamation of history, space, and belonging.
