American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Urbanization is an extremely important concept because virtually all European writers imagine that civilization arises only with cities and, indeed, the very word civilization is derived from the Latin civitat and civitas, citizenship, state, and, in particular, the city of Rome, which in turn is from civis, a citizen. The word city as well as Castellano ciudad is derived similarly. A people without cities or urban centers will ordinarily not be viewed as being “civilized” by Eurocentric writers, and, the dualistic split between “nature” and “culture” in much of Eurocentric thinking is also a “country” versus “city” split as I discuss in another article. Most European writers picture Native Americans as peoples living in the countryside, in jungles, forests, the plains/pampas, or in small villages surrounded by mountains as in the Andes. Naturally then it becomes problematic for them when they discover that huge numbers of First Nations peoples reside today in cities such as Buenos Aires, Lima, La Paz, Quito, Guatemala City, Mexico City, Toronto, Denver, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco-Oakland, and so on. What many non-Native writers do not realize is that the First Americans have, in fact, gone through periods of de-urbanization and re-urbanization on various occasions in their history and that urban life has long been a major aspect of American life from ancient times.

End-of-century demographic information reveals that a surprisingly large number of Indian people—almost half of the approximately two million who identified themselves as Native American in the last census—now live away from reservation and trust lands. Except for the fact that the American Indian population is significantly younger and growing more rapidly than that of the nation as a whole—a fact which has been true for decades but is confounding to presumptions of doom and vanishing—a descriptive profile reveals information that mostly confirms what Indian people already know: Our population is significantly poorer and at greater risk than the nation’s at large. The proportion of American Indian families living below the official poverty level is, in fact, almost three times that of all families taken together, and the per capita income of Indians is less than half that of Whites. Indians also have higher death rates attributable to accidents, suicides, and homicides; and the second leading cause of death for Native young adults is directly linked to the effects of alcoholism. Frequently motivated by poverty at home and the promise of greater economic opportunity elsewhere, Indian people, especially since World War II, have congregated in growing numbers in urban areas, where the particularities of their lived experience are either largely unexamined by non-Native American society or understood only within the broad categories of stereotype.

The Valley of the Sun is a large basin in which two major Sonoran Desert water systems, the Salt and Gila rivers, combine, enabling large-scale human settlement in central Arizona. The agricultural potential of this natural resource has sustained a stable population base since prehistoric times. Today it is home to a number of small cities that comprise the Phoenix metropolitan urban sprawl and more than half of the residents of the state of Arizona. Located at the far eastern foot of South Mountain, the southern natural boundary of the Valley, is Guadalupe, an urban anomaly that seems strangely juxtaposed in this widely spread, low density urban landscape fashioned by the advent of the automobile culture. Founded by Yaqui refugees from Sonora just after the turn of the century, the small one-square-mile desert settlement was not much more than a refugee camp, an innocuous cluster of extremely humble dwellings on the lightly populated Valley’s periphery. This was about to change. Just two years Guadalupe came into being, the small but significant city of Phoenix became the capital of the new state of Arizona. The peripheral location was also symbolic of the Yaquis’ lack of cultural and social integration in their new homeland. As the twentieth century progressed, so did the urban sprawl, eventually threatening to envelop Guadalupe, as would the social and cultural pressures of the dominant society.

Is urban a person or a place? Urban is a place, a setting in which many Indian people at some time in their lives visit, “establish an encampment,” or settle into. Urban doesn’t determine self-identity, yet the urban area and urban experiences are the context and some of the factors that contribute to defining identity. The intent of this article is to delineate some of the general structural characteristics of urban Indian communities in the United States, and to indicate the ways in which urban communities interplay with individual and group identity. While most of the focused research for this discussion has been carried out since 1978 in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the principal examples given here are specific to this region, many of the comments also are applicable on a general level to other urban Indian communities such as those found in Seattle, Los Angeles, and Chicago. The work, for example, of Garbarino and Straus on Chicago, Liebow on Phoenix, Shoemaker on Minneapolis, Bramstedt and Weibel-Orlando on Los Angeles, Danziger on Detroit, and Guillemin on Boston indicates parallels and counterpoints to the regional focus of this article. The next step beyond this current article is delineating the specific ways in which urban communities in different parts of the United States are unique and how they came to develop, as well as taking a comparative approach to understanding the extent and nature of parallels that do exist among widely distant urban Indian communities. It should be noted, however, that an in-depth comparative study of various urban communities is long, long overdue.

In the 1970s, the late Bob Thomas (Cherokee) of the University of Arizona warned that Indian people were becoming “ethnic Indians” with no tribal knowledge or connection, especially in the intertribal, interethnic urban environment. “There is now a whole generation of Indians,” he argued, “who have been born, raised and socialized in the city.... A great many city raised Indians are not distinctively Indian in the way that they behave or the way that they think about things”; and later, “I’m not so sure in my mind if Indians can exist as city people. The city really cuts one off from the ‘natural’ world. Can the Indian’s sacred world continue in a world of concrete and automobiles?” Social relations of Indians in cities, moreover, take place primarily with non-Indians: “American Indians do not live in old-style, bounded, ethnic neighborhoods as did earlier immigrants, but are scattered throughout the population,” which means that “There is very little of an Indian community in most cities. There are Indians living in cities and there are Indian centers in cities ... and you see some Indians involved with Indian centers. But they are a minority of the Indians who live in cities.” Among Indians in cities, tribal knowledge, identity, and connection were being displaced by pan-Indianism, which, along with its associated urban residence, were major threats to Indian people in his view.

When Chicago’s American Indian Center opened in 1953, it had a small core of dedicated leaders, but little support in the city. The Center’s board of directors had applied for funding to Chicago’s Metropolitan Welfare Council, the main clearinghouse of philanthropic funding in the city, only to be told that the Center’s existence was “contrary to our way of thinking.” It was not the first time that Native Americans seeking to create urban organizations had encountered rejection. For years, local Native American activists had found that urban Indians and Native American urban organizations were contrary to the way of thinking of many people in the city. What follows is a narrative history of activities which led to the American Indian Center’s creation, reconstructed from archival sources and expanding upon existing accounts of Chicago’s American Indian Center by Merwyn Garbarino and Janusz Mucha. It is intended as a counterpoint to the tendency of even recent scholarly work to use external forces to understand and explain urban Indian life. We tend to focus on the effects of life in the city upon Native Americans, rather than on the active way some Native Americans have attempted to effect changes in their urban life. In Chicago, as an example, archival documents show that Native American activists both instigated and sustained the struggle to create Native American organizations. They proposed such organizations as innovative solutions to the problems they perceived in urban life years before anyone else in Chicago recognized any need for such organizations. The following narrative demonstrates that in the years between 1946 and 1953 Native Americans in Chicago began to reshape local “ways of thinking” about Native American urban life and urban organizations.

INTRODUCTION Established in 1935, the Los Angeles County-based Indian Centers, Inc. (ICI) had provided a number of federally funded social services to the Native American residents of the Los Angeles Basin since the Johnson administration initiated its War on Poverty programs in the late 1960s. By the mid-1970s ICI consisted of a headquarters in downtown Los Angeles and satellite offices in Huntington Beach, Culver City, and San Gabriel Valley. It was described in 1977 as “the most widely known Indian institution in Los Angeles” and as having “existed longer and [being] more of a focal point of sentiment among [Los Angeles] Indians than any other Indian organization, past or present.” Los Angeles was already a venerable institution in 1967 when the founding families of the Orange County Indian Center (OCIC) began to store their collections of food and clothing for distribution among “our less fortunate Indian friends and neighbors in Orange County” in and from John and Louis Knifechief’s Stanton, California garage. While both ICI and OCIC had begun to receive federal employment and training funds and other federal social service grants at about the same time (1968-69), the Los Angeles-based organization had always been the more heavily and diversely funded. U.S. census figures certainly influenced the initial and unequal allocation of funds to these agencies. The 1960 census count indicates that eight times as many Native Americans lived in Los Angeles County as in Orange County—a difference that, although reduced to a four-to-one ratio by 1990 continues to characterize the proportion of Native American residents in each county.

In 1928 the Institute for Government Research published the results of its study on the conditions of the nation’s indigenous population. This inquiry, commonly known as the Meriam report, included a chapter on “migrated Indians,” acknowledging the fact that American Indians had begun to move away from reservations to the nation’s urban areas. The report estimated the number of these Indians at less than 10,000 nationally, but recognized that “general social and economic forces will inevitably operate to accelerate the migration of Indians from reservations to industrial communities.” This prediction proved correct. The decades since World War II especially have witnessed a major geographic redistribution of the Indian population in the United States from reservations to urban centers. This change in residence patterns resulted partly from the relocation and employment assistance programs of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), but general trends in American society also contributed to the migrations. World War II brought many Indian women and men to cities through military service or employment in the war industries; some stayed after the war was over. Changes in the nation’s eco-group in Phoenix. Interviews with activists in the community reveal women’s significant contributions to this process. They served as volunteers in church organizations, worked as professionals in the Phoenix Indian Center, and attempted to organize the community as a political force in the city. As they gained experience with the public space in their community work, they also became aware of power relationships that limited their choices and denied them their rights as Indian women. This awareness led to their organizing as women and to their identification of issues in terms of gender, displaying attitudes and opinions reflective of feminism. However, interviews with these women offer a very different perspective on their motivation and their relationship to feminism. Feminists or reformers? This article allows Indian women to determine the answer.

A convenient route to California, water for steam locomotives, and resources for construction to the Pacific dictated late nineteenth-century United States railroad expansion west through New Mexico territory. Land tenure conflicts in New Mexico plagued the Native American people of Laguna Pueblo, and by the 1880s their economy was shifting away from its traditional agrarian base. There is substantial evidence that declining agricultural success forced the people to look outside their traditional structure for subsistence. The arrival of railroading provided a needed outlet for internal economic pressures on the tribe. The appearance of the steam locomotive in the Southwest offered alternative employment; railroads led directly to the departure of many Laguna people to distant regions as wage laborers. After years of warring with tribes that plundered their villages, resisting Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo-American invaders, and accommodating squatters of all types, the Laguna Pueblo people came under a new pressure: Railroads would now vie for use of their land. In 1866 the Atlantic & Pacific received a federal grant of more than 13 million acres for a rail line between Albuquerque and the Arizona-California border at the Colorado River. Laguna territory lay squarely in the path of railroad surveys favoring a route from Colorado through New Mexico to California along the 35th Parallel.

INTRODUCTION Changes in the census data since 1960 point to the complexity of identity for American Indians today, a complexity that is even more pronounced in multitribal urban areas (see Table 1). Influenced by the work of early anthropologists, much of our understanding about American Indians comes from the study of Indian tribes as static, rigidly bound, and identifiable entities based on the observable characteristics of physiognomy, language, religion, customs, behaviors, and material culture, a dated model not applicable to urban Indian communities. Even among reservation tribal communities where ceremonial traditions are still practiced and tribal languages are still spoken, most bear little resemblance to the static images “captured” by anthropologists. Moreover, since the 1970s, more than half of all American Indians live in cities. While many continue to maintain ties with tribal communities, others are second- or third-generation “urban” Indians whose identity evolves around pan-Indian activities and multitribal urban communities. Complicating this are individuals who, by virtue of being able to recall an Indian ancestor, are now identifying as American Indian.

Our comedians were like the Lakotas called them “Heyokas,” and there’s trickster stories, dancers, singers, the contrary man. Everyone had something like that in their society. But that’s a little different than a standup nightclub routine. The comic says I’m tired of talking about me, let’s talk about you. —Charlie Hill Contrary to the dominant conception of Indians as humorless, stoic, and tragic, humor and comedy have always been central to Native American cultures. However, most people have never seen an Indian standup comedian. When I mention writing about Indian comedians, people often ask, “are there any?” Such a response reflects the scarcity of Indian comedians both in popular entertainment and in studies of humor. Most studies of Indian humor focus on rural and tribal rather than urban and individual forms of humor. Standup comedy is different than rural tribal comic traditions in several ways. Working primarily in urban comedy clubs or settings, standups perform as individuals conveying their personal sense of humor to their audiences. With comedy club audiences ranging from predominantly white to ethnically mixed, Indian standups serve as cross-cultural entertainers and educators. Drawing upon extensive ethnographic research and interviews I have conducted among comedians in California during the past five years, this essay analyzes how Indian standups mediate personal identity, convey cultural sensibilities, establish common ground across ethnic groups, and imaginatively expand consciousness. Going beyond prior studies of Indian humor emphasizing rural and collective forms, this study focuses on Indian humor within urban contexts among individual comedians.

The majority of us [city-raised Indian people] walk around with this hole in our heart. We know we’re different, that there’s a piece of our life that is missing. —Michelle Duncan Since the middle of the twentieth century, when large numbers of American Indian people began migrating from reservations to cities in search of work and a better life, a great deal has been published on the “urban Indian” phenomenon. While a few ethnographic or ethnohistorical works have appeared recently that seek to describe entire urban Indian communities in all their complexity, the great majority of urban Indian studies to date focus on some aspect of the circumstances, problems, and adjustment strategies of those who grew up on reservations and then moved to a city, or those who move back and forth between the two sites. This emphasis, while valuable, neglects an increasingly important segment of urban Indian communities—those whose parents grew up on reservations but who themselves have grown up in the city. In the present article, I focus on this second generation of urban Indian people in an analysis that relies heavily on life-historical interview material. Before turning to a description of the ethnographic setting and then to the narratives themselves, a few words on my theoretical and methodological perspective are in order.

INTRODUCTION Off-reservation and urban Native Americans experience complex, sociopolitical identity problems, especially within the framework of minority ethnic groups. These identity problems stem from racial discrimination; indigenous identity issues; tribal or reservation cultural affiliation; organizational involvement; extreme minority representation; and a general lack of economic, educational, or political support systems. Nearly all such problems and social conflicts are historically based, either present in actual governmental policies or in the perceptions of tribal members living in urban areas. This study finds that in the Chicago metropolitan area, these are further linked to social problems experienced by the other racial minority groups living in the area, exacerbating “minority of minorities” interactional fields with little demographic presence or political power. Chicago is an excellent location to study these complex, overlaid problems, which include identity construction and structural discrimination. Although the city is proximal to many Native nations and Indian lands in other states, Illinois does not have federally recognized Indian tribes or reservations. Chicago was a major relocation program city, amplifying the Native American population, traffic, and intertribal networks, even as support systems have waxed and waned over the years. Still, the city has hosted at least two nationally important conferences, with many programs run through local colleges, universities, and social service agencies, that have served as political fulcrums. In tandem with an ongoing reservation-to-city movement and cross-reservation mobility, Chicago has maintained a rich and diverse Native American population.

This exhibit is very informative; our Native peoples, “federally” recognized and unrecognized, full-blood and mixed-blood, from north, south, and central America, need to unite and free our minds from the colonial borders and governments imposed on our hemisphere. —An exhibitgoer reaction, May 1996 The American Indian Holocaust exhibit is a community project organized as part of the American Indian Alliance, a group of urban Indians, who first came together in the San Jose area in 1993. Rifts and tensions within the Indian community encouraged Laverne Morrissey, a strong, soft-spoken, articulate Paiute woman to form this group to bring the different factions back together. Al Cross (Mandan-Hidatsa), an American Indian history instructor at one of the local community colleges, and Roberto Ramirez (Indio/Chicano), a social worker for Santa Clara County, organize this annual exhibit. They lead a group of Indians and non-Indians who have put this exhibit on display—each year open to the public for a week or so— since its first showing in 1995 at the San Jose Center for the Latino Arts. This group uses woodblock prints, drawn by the colonizer, xeroxed from books and enlarged, in order to begin to heal the hurts caused by the American Indian Holocaust.

Despite widespread concern within American Indian communities, the world of research has paid scant attention to how Indian parenting traditions have been undermined by institutions such as boarding schools, urban relocation, and foster care. My goal in this paper is to begin to address some of these questions by documenting, both statistically and with case studies, the ways in which placements outside of Indian families and communities have often compromised the ability of Indian people to parent their children. I will focus specifically on the predicaments of former foster children, for these are people who have often vowed to be good parents, but have frequently been unable to live up to their expectations for themselves as all too often they have seen their children taken by the very foster care system they so hoped to avoid. While the dynamics I will be describing here are to be found throughout Indian country, there is reason to believe that they are especially common in urban Indian communities. In the course of my work in Minneapolis, I met many people who had come to the city after childhoods spent far from their natal communities. These were people who had been largely cut off from the communities into which they were born when they were placed in the homes of foster parents. And, while they now found themselves in the urban environment associating freely with Indian people, their childhood experiences continued to color their adult lives, especially their relationships with their children. The stories of these individuals speak powerfully to us about the predicaments of an as yet undetermined, but no doubt significant, number of urban Indian people.

These stories are excerpted from life histories of four urban Indian men speaking within the broader context of their addiction and recovery. These interviews are the most recent, abstracted from a research study (1993-1995) on addiction and recovery processes with American Indian women and men experiencing at least two years of recovery from alcohol. The chronology stretches from memories of childhood in 1944, through the 1960s and 1970s, problems with addiction in the 1980s, and recovery processes in the early 1990s. This study focuses on a sample of Indian men (ages 35-53) who are Wisconsin natives, share Oneida or Chippewa ancestry, are second-generation urban dwellers, and see themselves as Indian men. All have lived in Milwaukee, “A Gathering of the Waters” on Lake Michigan located north of Chicago, for at least twenty-five years. These men qualify as embodiments of Vizenor’s crossbloods—”the postmodern tribal bloodline”: Chippewa, Irish, Oneida, Mexican, Serbian-Croatian. The crossblood encounters are communal rather than tragic, and these stories are “splendid considerations of survivance.” It is the communal that is emphasized in this telling.

Today most Alaskan schools are public. However there are important historical differences between predominantly Native rural schools and predominantly non-Native urban schools. Many Alaskan rural schools have evolved from a handful of Russian-operated mission schools into approximately 150 small village public schools, while many urban schools are not unlike large schools outside of Alaska; that is, they reflect socioeconomic diversity rooted in broader U.S. society. Urban schools now enroll more Natives than ever before. In various ways the wider social forces and political battles which ensued as Alaska became a U.S. territory and later a state are represented in all of Alaska’s schools. The particular history of Native education reflects a long relationship of struggle between the original inhabitants of this land and those who came to exploit it. This brief paper is about Alaska Native life and education in and around Fairbanks, Alaska’s second largest city. Schooling and educational contexts are examined as key sites where specific cultural strategies are utilized to maintain Native identity. These strategies allow for a complex set of cultural responses to urban and school settings, which historically have been inhospitable to Natives. By “cultural strategies” I mean those attitudes, behaviors, and activities that enable individuals and communities to participate in their own culture(s), as well as in other cultures with minimized risk of cultural conflict. In Alaska these cultural strategies are deeply intertwined with issues of self-esteem, cultural pride, and academic achievement.

INTRODUCTION This article will first describe the Puyallup Reservation in Tacoma-Pierce County, Washington, focusing on its urban context and the demographics of the multitribal community it serves. The authors will then consider the Chief Leschi Schools system (pre-K through 12) in historic perspective and in its contemporary form. The community and family risk factors associated with the escalating problem of alcohol/drug abuse and violence/youth violence in the surrounding urban community and within the Puyallup Reservation will be discussed. The impact of the broader urban alcohol/drug abuse and violence on Chief Leschi Schools and its children and families will then be analyzed. The tribal programmatic response to this situation and particularly the development and the evolution of the prevention programs, Positive Reinforcement in Drug Education (PRIDE) and Puyallups Against Violence (PAV) will be discussed. These programs were designed to provide positive alternative activities to American Indian and Alaska Native students and the general multitribal community. The current design of the alcohol-drug-violence-gang prevention program (Safe Futures) and the future goals and plans for this program will then be reviewed. Special attention will be placed on reviewing the risk factors and protective factors targeted for intervention through the Safe Futures Program. Finally, the relevance of this project to a selected sample of the research literature will be discussed. This article is based on an analysis of historic data and a set of interviews with school staff, prevention staff, and general Puyallup tribal employees.