Conclusion

Narratives of declension and suffering have dominated histories and even popular memories of the Indian urban relocation experience. While negative consequences certainly overwhelmed many people’s experiences, and while the federal government was certainly derelict in its duty and dishonest in its promise, many Native American urban migrants achieved lives marked by dynamism, resiliency, audibility, visibility, and improved living standards. To obscure these important outcomes might be to unwittingly perpetuate another problematic story of Indians being swindled by settler powers. Native urban migrants incorporated urbanity into their futures. They chose to expand their worlds and spheres of influence, and not embalm them. Ultimately, we can see Indian urbanization as an empowering story.

They Always Come Back

The story of Native American urbanization and the urban relocation program typically concludes with a generation of Native people either stuck on “skid row” or fighting for a way out through the “Red Power” movement. There was a different but equally important outcome, however, in that many Native people made successful transitions to urban life on their own terms, while many others returned to reservation or rural Native communities and saw new opportunities there while drawing upon urban experiences to make contributions to tribal economic and political initiatives. Virtually an entire generation of new Native American tribal leaders drew upon years of experience living in major urban areas where they gained a more intimate understanding of how settler economies, politics, and power networks functioned.

Who Can Say They Are Apathetic and Listless Now?

Roughly 65,000 Native American people enlisted for overseas service or contributed domestically to war production industries during World War II. Expansive off-reservation work and migration experiences created a historical precedent and network for subsequent waves of Native peoples who moved to cities for new opportunities and better standards of living after making significant contributions to the United States’ victory in World War II. Meanwhile, paying attention to Native American patriotism and urban labor, the federal government began envisioning an urban relocation program.

Relocation Has Degraded Indian People

While thousands of Native American people actively sought opportunities to improve their and their families’ lives through urban relocation, many could not have anticipated the failures of an underfunded federal program and urban opportunities foreclosed by racism, discrimination, paternalism, poverty, and a dramatically shifting national economy that saw the best jobs and housing relocate from cities to suburbs and the Sunbelt. For many involved, relocation became yet another failed promise on the part of the federal government.

The Bear and How He Went over the Mountain

Surviving the federal reservation confinement, land allotment, and boarding school programs and policies, a generation of Native American peoples sought to avoid the traumas of previous generations while thinking and acting creatively as they maneuvered within and contributed to rapidly changing social, economic, and cultural contexts in the first three decades of the twentieth century.

Introduction

Beginning with the socially, economically, and physically confining late-nineteenth-century reservation system, and throughout the twentieth century, Native American peoples practiced mobility and experienced urbanity on their own terms and with their own futures and survival strategies in mind. They did so in pursuit of new social, education, and work opportunities. This is a story that greatly transcends the history of the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ 1950s-60s urban relocation program, which scholars have long cited as the reason why roughly 75 per cent of all Native American people live in urban areas today. More Native people urbanized outside of the program, to more places, and for more reasons than historians have previously emphasized.

I Can Learn Any Kind of Work

Beginning with the introduction of the federal urban relocation program in 1952, thousands of Native American people hoped to use the program on their own terms, with their own goals in mind. Many Native participants proved to be much more than passive subjects or victims--especially those who personally wrote federal officials to make specific requests and explain their particular needs within the program. This chapter provides an expansive view of Native American urban relocation program participants and their complicated and sometimes surprising experiences in cities during the 1950s-60s.

These People Come and Go Whenever They Please

After fighting for their own Double Victory campaign (victory at home and victory abroad), Native American people, in the context of dual citizenship, demanded civil rights and a better standard of living. But they did not necessarily want to achieve these goals at the expense of their own histories, cultures, and persistence as Native American people representing sovereign nations. The initial conceptualization and introduction of the Bureau of Indian Affairs urban relocation program faltered as federal officials struggled to agree on program goals, and potential Native participants put their own communities’ economies and needs first.