A city of modest size, Providence, Rhode Island, had the
third-largest Native American population in the United States by
the first decade of the nineteenth century. Native Providence tells
their stories at this historical moment and in the decades before
and after, a time when European Americans claimed that Northeast
Natives had mostly vanished. Denied their rightful place in
modernity, men, women, and children from Narragansett, Nipmuc,
Pequot, Wampanoag, and other ancestral communities traveled diverse
and complicated routes to make their homes in this city. They found
each other, carved out livelihoods, and created neighborhoods that
became their urban homelands—new places of meaningful attachments.
Accounts of individual lives and family histories emerge from
historical and anthropological research in archives, government
offices, historical societies, libraries, and museums and from
community memories, geography, and landscape. Patricia E. Rubertone
chronicles the survivance of the Native people who stayed, left and
returned, who faced involuntary displacement by urban renewal, who
lived in ProviÂdence briefly, or who made their presence known both
there and in the wider indigenous and settler-colonial
worlds. These individuals reenvision the city's past through
everyday experiences and illuminate documentary and spatial tactics
of inequality that erased Native people from most nineteenth- and
early twentieth-century history.