Indians on the Move: Native American Mobility and Urbanization in the Twentieth Century

By Douglas K. Miller

In 1972, the Bureau of Indian Affairs terminated its twenty-year-old Voluntary Relocation Program, which encouraged the mass migration of roughly 100,000 Native American people from rural to urban areas. At the time the program ended, many groups--from government leaders to Red Power activists--had already classified it as a failure, and scholars have subsequently positioned the program as evidence of America's enduring settler-colonial project. But Douglas K. Miller here argues that a richer story should be told--one that recognizes Indigenous mobility in terms of its benefits and not merely its costs. In their collective refusal to accept marginality and destitution on reservations, Native Americans used the urban relocation program to take greater control of their socioeconomic circumstances. Indigenous migrants also used the financial, educational, and cultural resources they found in cities to feed new expressions of Indigenous sovereignty both off and on the reservation.

The dynamic histories of everyday people at the heart of this book shed new light on the adaptability of mobile Native American communities. In the end, this is a story of shared experience across tribal lines, through which Indigenous people incorporated urban life into their ideas for Indigenous futures.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Feb 20, 2019
• ISBN: 9781469651392

Douglas K. Miller

Douglas K. Miller is assistant professor of history at Oklahoma State University.

Book preview

Indians on the Move

Critical Indigeneities

J. Kēhaulani Kauanui and Jean M. O’Brien, series editors

SERIES ADVISORY BOARD

Chris Anderson, University of Alberta

Irene Watson, University of South Australia

Emilio del Valle Escalante, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Kim TallBear, University of Texas at Austin

Critical Indigeneities publishes pathbreaking scholarly books that center Indigeneity as a category of critical analysis, understand Indigenous sovereignty as ongoing and historically grounded, and attend to diverse forms of Indigenous cultural and political agency and expression. The series builds on the conceptual rigor, methodological innovation, and deep relevance that characterize the best work in the growing field of critical Indigenous studies.

Indians on the Move

Native American Mobility and Urbanization in the Twentieth Century

DOUGLAS K. MILLER

The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill

This book was published in association with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University by the University of North Carolina Press.

© 2019 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Set in Charis by Westchester Publishing Services

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Miller, Douglas K., 1976– author.

Title: Indians on the move : Native American mobility and urbanization in the twentieth century / Douglas K. Miller.

Other titles: Critical indigeneities.

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press,

[2019]

| Series: Critical indigeneities | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018036571 | ISBN 9781469651378 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469651385 (pbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469651392 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Indians of North America—United States—Social conditions. | Indians of North America—Government relations—History. | Indians of North America—Urban residence. | Migration, Internal—United States.

Classification: LCC E98.S67 M55 2019 | DDC 970.004/97—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018036571

Cover illustrations: Photographs from BIA Relocation Records, Edward E. Ayer Manuscript Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago.

For Christopher

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Painting a New Landscape: Native American Mobility in the Twentieth Century

1 The Bear and How He Went over the Mountain

Confinement and the Boarding School Generation

2 Who Can Say They Are Apathetic and Listless Now?

War Industry Work and the Roots of the Relocation Program

3 These People Come and Go Whenever They Please

Negotiating Relocation in Postwar Native America

4 I Can Learn Any Kind of Work

Indian Initiative in Urban America

5 Relocation Has Degraded Indian People

Urbanization’s Catastrophic Potential

6 They Always Come Back

Urban Indians’ Return to and Influence on a Changing Indian Country

Conclusion

A Place Made of Sorrow?

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

John Angaiak (Yup’ik), I’m Lost in the City, 3

To Los Angeles, 95

Departing for relocation, 96

Billings Area Office relocation brochure: Stuck in your tepee?, 97

Information about relocation services: It may take several tries before you get a job, 99

Information about relocation services: Relocating is not easy, 100

Information about relocation services: Relocation services can help only those who help themselves!, 101

Mrs. Jose Ortiz walking her daughter alongside white woman, 103

Billie family on sofa, 104

BIA Chicago Office job appointment card (front), 153

BIA Chicago Office job appointment card (back), 154

Matthew Pilcher (Winnebago): "Winnebago, Nebraska, is home. I was only living in Chicago," 164

Lester Chapoose (Ute): There was no picnic out there for anybody who didn’t belong, 174

Junior relocatees waiting to depart, 191

Our largest family unit—still successfully relocated, 192

Acknowledgments

Where to begin. So many remarkable people have provided me so much support, guidance, perspective, trust, and encouragement. It’s an honor to acknowledge them here.

The late Erskine Carter, my English literature professor, was my first great academic influence, as well as an early film, literature, and Dylanology guru. He taught me that it’s important to spend some time with it. I didn’t get a chance to express my adoration and appreciation prior to his passing. Before I ever would have guessed that I would end up in this profession, he showed me that it’s okay to be unconventional (myself).

At the University of Minnesota, Jeani O’Brien’s class changed my life course. You should go to graduate school, Doug, she said one afternoon in her office, where I used to linger with so many questions. What’s graduate school? I replied, quite seriously. She saw something in me that I could not see. On her advice, I broke up my band and moved to Chicago. And she was right. Here I am today. Unbelievable.

At the University of Illinois at Chicago, my thesis adviser, Brian Hosmer, coached me up from a musician posing as a history student to a history student posing as a musician. He created so many opportunities for me over the years, and he remains a loyal advocate and caring mentor to this day.

At the University of Oklahoma, my doctoral adviser, Warren Metcalf, provided outstanding guidance, perspective, and support. He was the calm but confident mentor I needed for such an ambitious research project at a challenging time in my life. Also at OU, I appreciated generous support and advice from David Wrobel, Josh Piker, Robert Griswold, Bob Rundstrom, Terry Rugeley, Steve Gillon, and Sterling Evans.

I remain so fond of my time at Southern Methodist University’s Clements Center for Southwest Studies, where I joined a new family. Sherry Smith believed and invested in my project, my future, and me. She listened carefully and kept the faith. Andy Graybill became and remains a great friend, professional adviser, and champion of my work. Ruth Ann Elmore was the first person I met upon arriving in Dallas. What a great ambassador! More than that, she became my dear friend. My fellow fellows—Rachel St. John, Andrew Offenberger, and Gavin Benke—made my fellowship year an especially enjoyable experience. At my Clements Center manuscript workshop, I received unparalleled and truly inspiring instruction on the crafts of writing, conceptualization, and analysis from my workshop invitees Phil Deloria and Robert Self. As well, I benefited from thoughtful critiques and encouragement from fellow workshop participants Ed Countryman, Louis Warren, Neil Foley, Todd Kerstetter, Max Krochmal, Margaret Neubauer, Steve Denson, Sami Lakomäki, and Lisa Barnett. Such a fine group of scholars; I truly miss the Clements Center.

I am so grateful for Oklahoma State University providing me the opportunity to harness all of this support, inspiration, and mentorship in service of my own career, colleagues, and students. From this side of the profession, I now try to pay things back and forward. But then I’m just accumulating more debt here. I sincerely appreciate my wonderful students and faculty colleagues here in Stillwater. In her capacity as history department head, Laura Belmonte offered reliable and extensive support for my book project, my teaching, and my general role within the department. I am indebted to my faculty writing group colleagues—Jim Huston, Rick Rohrs, Laura Belmonte, John Kinder, Yongtao Du, Holly Karibo, Thomas Carlson, Emily Graham, Anna Zeide, Matt Schauer, Richard Boles, Louise Siddons, and Laura Arata—for providing critical feedback on my work. I thank my entire department for the friendship, generosity, enthusiasm, and support they have demonstrated since my arrival.

At UNC Press, I am especially grateful for my editor Mark Simpson-Vos’s strong support for my project. Mark did an outstanding job shepherding this book through publication. He listens patiently and carefully, and takes my ideas and concerns seriously. He has been the nurturing presence I needed. At UNC Press, I also thank Jessica Newman and Cate Hodorowicz for their hard work bringing this book to fruition. As well, I sincerely thank my two anonymous manuscript reviewers for providing careful and encouraging feedback that made this a much better book. Finally, I thank J. Kehaulani Kauanui and Jeani O’Brien for inviting my book into their series.

I owe a special mention of gratitude to the people who took time to share with me their personal insights and reflections on the urban relocation program and urban Indigenous communities. Father Peter Powell was instrumental in setting this project in motion when he invited me to Chicago’s St. Augustine’s Center for American Indians and opened his personal archive to me. Ada Deer graciously spent an entire day with me in Wisconsin sharing her experiences with the relocation program. The late Matthew Pilcher spent an entire day with me discussing his urban experiences in Los Angeles and Chicago, and his return to his Winnebago, Nebraska, home. At the Urban Inter-Tribal Center of Texas, Angela Young and Mike Frazier spent the afternoon reflecting on their experiences as proud members of the Dallas–Fort Worth Indian community. Most recently, the great singer-songwriter John Angaiak took time to share some personal reflections on his song I’m Lost in the City.

So many more people have lent their time, friendship, feedback, advice, and professional support along the way. Thank you Kevin Whalen, Coll Thrush, Colleen O’Neill, Boyd Cothran, Dan Cobb, John Troutman, Malinda Maynor Lowery, Kasey Keeler, Nick Rosenthal, Kent Blansett, David Beck, Albert Old Crow, Steve Blake, Carter Meland, Kristen Shedd, Justin Castro, Jeff Fortney, Rowan Steinekker, Brian Rindfleisch, Brandi Hilton, Dustin Mack, Jim Sack, Jenna Nigro, Michael Goode, Perry Clark, Tom Dorrance, Robert Johnston, and Corey Capers, among many, many others.

Now I turn to family. Christopher, Mary, AJ, and Seth von Alt welcomed me into their family, made me feel like I belong, and continue to provide needed love, support, music, joy, and laughter. My little brother, Nick, has been a great friend, confidant, and model of strength and determination; I look up to him. Maggie and Holland curled up next to me many late nights while I wrote this book. They reminded me that a grand adventure begins with each new and never dull day.

When I search for some psychoanalytical, autobiographical explanation for what drew me to this book’s subject, I tend to think of my mother. My mother worked from the bottom up, against the odds. She taught me to let our family’s hardships drive me but not define me. She worked tirelessly to provide for my brother and me. She held us together in the eye of a hurricane. I owe her my life.

Finally, I marvel at my wife’s stunning beauty, and I revel in her infinite love. A great friendship and sense of adventure has underscored our relationship from the outset. I could not have written this book without her feedback, support, and assistance. My love for her is pure and true. And now, as I let go of this project, I am excited to turn to our new project—our amazing baby boy, Christopher.

Introduction

Painting a New Landscape: Native American Mobility in the Twentieth Century

Abandoned at birth in a garbage can in Gallup, New Mexico, Tom Bee survived a tough childhood as a Dakota boy far removed from Dakota country. Reaching adulthood in the late 1960s, he adopted the course of so many aspiring young musicians anxious to break into the rock-and-roll business and receive from fans the adoration their parents failed to provide: he boarded a bus bound for Hollywood. After several rounds of knocking on record company doors, Bee finally found work as a songwriter in the Los Angeles office of the legendary Motown Records. Having successfully composed hit songs for Michael Jackson, to whom he gifted a turquoise ring, and Smokey Robinson, Bee finally scored his own album deal and formed an intertribal Indian rock band from Albuquerque dubbed XIT (an acronym for Crossing of Indian Tribes). During its peak in the 1970s, XIT opened its live shows with the voice of western film icon John Wayne reciting a prerecorded Pledge of Allegiance over the audio system while a spotlight homed in on front-man Bee, draped in a rhinestone-sequined upended American flag—a traditional Native American distress symbol.¹

Indian people in distress emerged as a central motif within the group’s music. For example, despite operating out of Albuquerque and touring metropolitan America with marquee artists such as Three Dog Night, Joe Cocker, and the Beach Boys, XIT condemned cities for their punishing treatment of Native peoples. The group’s third album, Relocation (1977), took specific aim at the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs’ former pet program, the Voluntary Relocation Program, which between 1952 and 1972 provided programmatic support for the movement of roughly one hundred thousand Native Americans from rural Indian Country to what increasingly became urban Indian Country.² XIT’s appraisal of the relocation program is best captured in a cutting lyric from the album’s title track: Relocation / taking me far away / relocation / taking my roots away.³ Perhaps Bee’s indictment of the big city, which he depended on for his livelihood as a musician, stemmed from his own catastrophic urban beginnings. Entering the world the way I did, just left in a garbage can, is not a thing to be proud of, he disclosed. For years I felt betrayed.⁴

A similar betrayal explains not only musicians’ but numerous Native peoples’ enduring memory of urban America as a place made of sorrow.⁵ Many urban Indians felt abandoned by a paternalistic federal government that raised expectations for a better standard of living and often failed to meet them. In her autobiography, the late Cherokee Nation chief Wilma Mankiller portrayed relocation participants as unwitting victims, lured from their ancestral homelands into urban traps. Recalling the fear she experienced as a child witnessing an elevator for the first time after her family relocated to San Francisco, she claimed, No one had bothered to even try to prepare us for city living.⁶ Likewise, at one point the main protagonist in Kiowa author N. Scott Momaday’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel House Made of Dawn (1969) falls under the disorienting spell of colorful Los Angeles lights, store windows filled with shiny things, and old men selling newspapers who are always yelling at you, but you can’t understand them.⁷ You know that relocation program, Momaday explained, I think it was bad for most of the tribes … because they just weren’t equipped … to leave the reservation and make their way in the city. It was just too much of an adjustment.⁸ Consider too the suggestion by Russell Means—famed Lakota actor and leading figure during the American Indian Movement’s early-1970s heyday—that the federal government’s primary agenda had been to "integrate Indians into urban ghettos so that in a few generations

[they]

would intermarry and disappear into the underclass. Then the government could take the rest of

[their]

land and there would be no one left to object. Concluding there, Means’s summary captures the prevailing appraisal of the program. But he had more to say: I didn’t quite grasp all that at the time. I understood only that reservation Indians were being offered transportation to several cities around the country, plus job training, and housing and employment assistance."⁹

Consider a second, less ambivalent counternarrative. The title of Yupik singer-songwriter John Angaiak’s 1971 album I’m Lost in the City ostensibly seems to agree with the reigning memory of urbanization as an adverse experience for Indigenous people—a place where one becomes lost, isolated, endangered, alone. But he employed a different meaning of lost in his album liner notes on the title track: To many Natives that have never experienced a city life, city is a place where they can escape the norms of the village life. City is a place where no villager watches him any longer; that is, he is able to do things that he normally does not do in the village. So he gets lost in the city, as it is kind of a pioneering all the way. From Angaiak’s perspective, cities were not burial grounds for Indigenous cultures; rather, they were places of opportunity, where one could escape surveillance, be anonymous, and do things one does not do in the village. Angaiak wanted to get lost in the city, to remove his mask or wear a new one. He wanted to reflect on life beyond his daily cultural context. Such an experience was not distressing but enriching: Amazing city / I found it to be / And the skies are full of mystery / And the streets are full of many people / And people I don’t know.¹⁰

John Angaiak (Yup’ik), I’m Lost in the City album cover (1971, reissued in 2016). Courtesy of John Angaiak and Light in the Attic Records/Future Days Recordings.

Cities do, after all, project timeless auras as places of reinvention. This book explores this dimension of the urban Indian experience. It casts Indian mobility and urbanization, especially through the federal Voluntary Relocation Program, as a larger story of survival—or, more appropriately, survivance, to borrow Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor’s term—through transformation.¹¹ It argues that urban relocation could be just as regenerative as degenerative, that Native people bent relocation to their own purposes and influenced its outcomes in unpredictable ways. While being mindful of power differentials between Native people and the American settler-colonial state, this book seeks to accentuate the fortitude urban Indians demonstrated in making the difficult and consequential decision to achieve socioeconomic stability through spatial mobility. While taking seriously the traumatic legacies that became the story of relocation, this book attempts a richer history of not only Native people’s winding paths to cities but also their circular paths through cities, mainstream systems of settler-state power, and their viable position within increasingly global communities. This is not to implicate Native people in the program’s failures but to emphasize their ingenuity and resolve in spite of those failures. Indeed, this book considers not just the fraught effects of urbanization but also the dynamic causes.

A personal statement that self-identified full-blood Northern Cheyenne oil painter Dennis Field, submitted as part of his Adult Vocational Training program application in 1963, is revealing. If I am given half the chance I will make it pay off, he promised. I feel it in my blood.… I want a chance to learn what the schools of art have to offer and a chance to learn more. At home in Lame Deer, Montana, Field was barely getting by selling oil paintings of western landscapes. In fact, just two years prior, he had checked himself into the Montana State Hospital for alcoholism treatment. As he stabilized, friends and family impressed by his artistic talents began encouraging him to aspire to something greater. Finally agreeing, Field submitted his application for training in fine art at a studio based in Chicago, over one thousand miles from home. The one and only reason that I signed up for AVT is to further my knowledge of my trade, ‘The pallet and the paint brush,’ and to develop my talents as an artist, he disclosed. "No man can know to

[

sic

]

much or enough. Suggesting the premium he placed on lifting himself above any restrictions on how and where he could belong in the wider world, Field concluded, I deeply respect teachers because they are men who started from the bottom and worked up.… I have learned that once started on a trail, never turn back."¹²

Stretching canvases, selecting tools, blending colors, fashioning a vision, refining an aesthetic, sharpening a skill, chasing inspiration—these particulars of Field’s painting practice form a fitting metaphor for a substantial portion of the Native American population’s entry into America’s social, cultural, economic, and political mainstream during the twentieth century. Through a series of complementary programs, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) promised to provide Native people with steady jobs and desirable housing in various western and midwestern metropolises. Program architects predicted that movement into the mainstream of American life would offer Indians an escape from socioeconomic despair while providing the Cold War–era Congress an opportunity to get out of the Indian business, which had become dangerously distended during the New Deal, critics charged. For the most part, however, this did not unfold according to plan. Unanticipated outcomes resulted from Native people bringing their own experiences—their baggage—along for the ride.

With that, twentieth-century urban Indian migrations amounted to more than a consequence of BIA machinations. In their collective refusal to be starved and stereotyped into reservation margins, Native people not only adapted to changing historical currents but also moved into the belly of the settler-colonial beast and, paradoxically, achieved a degree of decolonization by harnessing a historically Indigenous survival strategy: mobility.¹³ In the process, they negotiated the terms of relocation while shaping its outcome in profound and unexpected ways.

The postwar urban Indian generation significantly expanded the previously restricted potential for Indians to become not just welders and hairdressers, in gendered fashion, but also doctors, lawyers, actors, athletes, politicians, college professors, and more. Through that determination, they incorporated such futures into, and not outside, Indigeneity. Moreover, numerous urban Indians gained important skills to improve their respective nations’ ability to exercise self-determination and sovereignty in a changing political arena. On one hand, the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, as Audre Lorde cautioned.¹⁴ Before Native Americans could dismantle the settler’s house, however, they had to rebuild their own. In the context of recent traumas perpetrated by the settler state, physical and cultural confinement, and economic desperation, Native people innovated to survive. One way they survived the settler state was by mainstreaming into it. Indeed, discussing the Makah people’s survival on their ancestral Pacific Northwest lands and seas, historian Joshua Reid calls this a traditional future, explaining that they succeeded because they engaged the settler-colonial world, but on their own terms and for their own reasons.¹⁵

Native Americans who urbanized in the twentieth century attempted something similar. They practiced what historian Eric Hobsbawm might have referred to as working the system … to their minimum disadvantage.¹⁶ Through this process, they became a racialized minority in the settler state’s imagination and legislation. Yet they were also the only racialized minority either welcomed or forced into an Anglo-American culture and society that barred other racialized minorities from equal belonging in the body politic. Thus, while participation reified settler-state power, it also created a unique opportunity for Native American people to mobilize the colonizers’ idiom of progress in service of decolonization. As migration historian James Gregory notes, Conquest may not be the only basis through which moving masses can redirect the flow of history. Infiltration can also be powerful.¹⁷

This approach began well before the BIA’s postwar urban relocation program, or even before Native peoples’ autonomous foray into urban war production industries during World War II. It began, however (in)visibly, with the ambitions of a generation of young Native people who, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, entered boarding school and work outing programs that removed them from reservations—at times through categorical abduction—and exposed them to remedial versions of market capitalism and Western education epistemologies. Rather than return to reservations upon completion of their studies (a process federal officials derisively termed going back to the blanket), numerous government boarding school graduates carved out space in urban industrial centers, where they could advance their educations and deploy their vocational skills for gainful employment. Convinced of their capacity for competing in modern American society on their own terms, they established burgeoning Indian communities in such places as Chicago, Los Angeles, and Tulsa. Some socially savvy Indians formed national Indian rights organizations, such as the Society of American Indians, which sought to uplift the Indian race from the supposedly dehumanizing effects of reservation life. These Red Progressives decried federal paternalism and advocated socioeconomic mobility as the most viable path forward.

During the 1930s, this racial uplift movement of Indian intellectuals yielded to a broader social movement of Native people who incrementally fanned outward from reservations as they participated in New Deal programs, such as the Civilian Conservation Corps. Subsequently, during World War II, upward of sixty-five thousand Native men and women either enlisted for overseas military service or secured employment in the new war production industries that dotted the American West. After the war, discharged soldiers and a contracting war industry forced many Indian workers back home. Those who had enjoyed steady wages and cosmopolitan life for the first time were understandably distraught when they returned to their reservations and witnessed the further deteriorating socioeconomic conditions and diminishing acreage. Facing such moribund circumstances, thousands of American Indians applied for urban relocation and vocational training programs.

Joining the overarching trend toward postwar sociocultural consensus, the Bureau of Indian Affairs designed its Voluntary Relocation Program as a solution to the United States’ enduring Indian problem. Federal policymakers hoped that steady employment for adult Indian males, domestic lessons for adult Indian women, and public schooling for Indian children would finally emancipate Indians from cultures they deemed inherently at odds with capitalism. Notwithstanding program officials’ aggressive campaigns, however, Native people, whenever possible, attempted to negotiate the terms and goals of relocation for their own purposes. As it turned out, not all succeeded according to the government’s plan; thousands of Native people landed on skid row and suffered the consequences of entrusting their lives to the program. Some became lost in labyrinthine urban metropolises. Meanwhile, the old urban industrial centers decayed during the national shift to a service economy, the American dream relocated to the suburbs, and deindustrialization undermined the potential for an urban Indian middle class. Those who lived the failure of relocation’s promise connected through a shared experience across tribal lines and joined other racial and ethnic groups in a wider condemnation of the deindustrializing Cold War urban landscape. Importantly, such disaffection fueled not only the rise of the Red Power movement but also a process of reverse relocation, in which a significant number of urban Indians migrated back to Indian Country and played pivotal roles in tribal leadership.

________

In 1952—the Voluntary Relocation Program’s inaugural year—the Pulitzer Prize committee honored Oscar Handlin’s The Uprooted (1951) with its annual award given to an outstanding new work of history. Handlin fashioned his analysis around rural European peasant communities within which members nurtured a relatively homogeneous existence and from which they derived their primary sense of being. According to historian Rudolph Vecoli, however, such communities never actually existed. He argued that Handlin’s study assumed idealized peasant communities that on closer examination demonstrated far more stratification than Handlin understood or acknowledged. Diversity, Vecoli insisted, mattered. A truly satisfying interpretation of human migration, he implied, must appreciate the protagonist as much as the process. Moreover, he reasoned, treating immigrants as faceless masses does little to reveal the vibrancy, dynamism, and sheer importance of their individual journeys.¹⁸

A comparable historiographical oversight applies to the first wave of scholarship on urban American Indians, of course with the important distinction that American Indians are not immigrants. Most foundational interpretations position Native people who ventured beyond their reservation limits within a binary analytical framework that considers rural space inherently antimodern and urban space inherently modern. It follows that within this framework, Indians who moved to cities were always moving deeper into assimilation. Effectively, assimilation, or the lack thereof, became the overarching analytical problem for scholarship that ultimately did not advance much beyond Handlin’s antiquated assertion that the history of immigration is a history of alienation and its consequences.¹⁹

While most of the extant literature on Indian urbanization succeeds in explaining how Native people managed metropolitan life while cultivating a unique brand of urban sociocultural space, it often fails to explain why they accepted the urban challenge in the first place, or how the relocation program fit within larger patterns of Indian social, economic, and spatial mobility during the twentieth century. It also tends to emphasize a narrative in which Indian people only accepted relocation assistance out of sheer economic desperation and then fell prey not only to a poorly administered program but also to technological puzzles. Numerous works of both fiction and nonfiction privilege accounts of Indians who fumble with modern gadgets and struggle to cope with the future. Such works perhaps inadvertently perpetuate what Ned Blackhawk sees as the pathological urban Indian trope, or what Coll Thrush terms the primitive rube in the city trope.²⁰ Take, for example, an informant in Stan Steiner’s popular book The New Indians (1968), who claimed that some urban relocatees could not figure out when to eat lunch.²¹

Dakota scholar Vine Deloria Jr. indicated that he was not impressed by such literature when, during his introduction to a panel discussion on urban Indians at Princeton University in 1970, he pointed to the old statistics-type of literature that was then available. Citing a study that asked how a Navajo homemaker in Denver calculated her family’s weekly budget, he concluded, I think the literature regarding off-reservation Indians is incredibly bizarre.²² Deloria was on to something. For numerous Native people, urban relocation was indeed alienating, frightening, and challenging. The impersonal face and breakneck pace of urban life could be incredibly isolating and overwhelming. And new modes of technology could be quite befuddling. But this was true for most rural people new to city living. As the following study will stress, Indian urban migrants were more than a monolithic group of disadvantaged newcomers and chronic underachievers, to borrow James Gregory’s language.²³

Telling a more complicated story, then, is about more than locating human agency or rescuing urban Indians from victimhood. It is about depathologizing and demystifying urban Indians’ struggles with urban adjustments. It is about removing them from the realm of caricature. It is about a determination to tell this story without unwittingly reproducing the idea that Indigenous peoples do not belong in cosmopolitan urban space. It is about seeing urban Indians as practitioners of competing modes of modernity, mobility, ingenuity, and even anonymity, but not at the expense of Indigeneity.

A recent movement of more nuanced and satisfying scholarship on internal United States migrations and Indian urbanization supports this approach. This study embraces James Gregory’s challenge to migration historians to dismantle the maladjustment paradigm.²⁴ In addition, it heeds historian Coll Thrush’s challenge to move beyond discourses of urban Indian poverty and dislocation that mask more complicated experiences: the surprising opportunities offered by urban life, the creative struggles to carve out Indian spaces in the cities, and, most importantly, the ways in which Native women and men have contributed to urban life.²⁵ This book therefore explores the wages of Indian urbanization. By that I mean it focuses less on statistics, organizations, policies, and