This is the first of two chapters on indigenous peoples in settler states. Here I focus on the case of Native Americans in the United States and show that urbanization and the demographic shift out of reservations in the late twentieth century led to widespread re-identification from more narrow tribal identities to a broader Native American identity. Census data from the 1980 US census shows a robust negative correlation at the tribal level between levels of urbanization and speaking tribal languages at home – but not between high school education and tribal language ability – which adds further evidence that it is not literacy or education that is driving assimilation. However, due to the legalization of Native American casinos from the 1980s, tribal land suddenly became economically valuable and altered the incentives for ethnic homogenization. As expected, I find evidence for an increased salience in tribal identities among Native Americans, which has in some cases led to claims for new tribal land and even new tribal identities.

Here I examine the case of the Māori in New Zealand, which provides me with a second case study of how processes of declining and then increasing values for tribal land has affected ethnic identity. As in the USA, population growth and subsequent urbanization in the mid-twentieth-century led to a rise in pan-Māori nationalism, with evidence that native language loss in cities did not halt the rise of Māoritanga (Māori-ness). However, judicial rulings that attempted to compensate the Māori for their historical loss of land and livelihoods gave resources to individual iwi (tribes) rather than the Māori community as a whole, which has had led to a renewed emphasis on iwi identity above and beyond a common Māori identity. In particular I focus on fisheries policy that has allocated money to iwis according to their coastline length and show that those iwi with longer coastlines have seen higher population growth in recent censuses. I conclude the chapter with a brief examination of indigenous peoples in both Australia and Canada, where I show that industrialization has induced assimilation into pan-tribal identities.