Che Jim: You might recognise this famous fearless lunch. [Image of Lunch atop a Skyscraper]

But did you know that many of those men, the ones who built New York skyline were Native, known as Skywalkers?

These Mohawk iron workers braved the heights to create the Big Apple you know today. They literally built one of the most famous cities in the world. 

So why do we rarely talk about natives living in cities?

Hi, I'm Che Jim, and welcome to Crash Course: Native American History. 

[Theme music]

In episode 14, we talked about the relocation and termination era, the period between the 1950s and 60s when the US government attempted to get rid of Native Americans altogether through two main methods. 

Relocating Native individuals to cities where they would assimilate or disappear into mainstream American culture and ending the federal recognition of over a hundred tribes. 

It was a rough time, or "not a vibe" in Gen Z terms. 

Today, we're going to grapple with the fallout from that first element, relocation, and how it created a whole new way to be Indian, for better or worse. 

Let's kick back to the early 1950s. Like I mentioned in episode 14, in the wake of World War II, the US federal government was looking for ways to cut costs. 

All those nukes cost money. And on the chopping block yet again was fulfilling their agreements to native people, this time on reservations. So through some complicated manoeuvring, they moved many of us off of reservations and into luxurious beach cabanas. 

Just kidding. They moved us into cities. 

The new commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, or BIA, Dillon S. Myer, thought reservations were overpopulated and not worth investing in.

So his plan was to offer Native Americans a one-way ticket to the city where they could blend into mainstream society. That would leave their reservation lands ready and available for taxation and sale. 

With no reservations and Natives fully assimilated, the government would get out of the promises they had made in treaties and would close the Bureau of Indian Affairs for good. 

Goodbye reservations. Goodbye treaty promises. Goodbye Indians. 

This plan came from the same guy who'd led the forced internment of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. 

So yeah, yikes. Rest assured, the ancestors had a word with him in the afterlife. 

The cornerstone of Myer's plan was a relocation program which the Bureau of Indian Affairs launched in 1953. 

It offered a paid ride and a month's stipend to any Native person willing to relocate to a city, promising they'd find plenty of good jobs, good schools, and good housing.

Basically, the stuff for a better life.

Eventually, the BIA added job training to the mix. So many Natives were willing to relocate that the BIA got more applications than it could actually accept. 

But for many, those big promises weren't what they were cracked up to be. Instead of prosperity, many Natives found scarce housing and low-end jobs. They experienced culture shock and racism, all without the support of their communities back home. 

Many Native people left. Other wanted to leave, but had no way of getting back to their reservations. 

Between 1953 and 1973, it's estimated that at least 100,000 Native Americans moved to cities like Chicago, Denver, LA, San Francisco, and Cleveland. 

Yes, even Cleveland. Those poor souls. 

And the BIA didn't measure the relocation program success by how well people did in those cities, but how many people were still in those cities a year later, whether they wanted to be or not. 

Because as long as Natives were off reservations, to the US government, they were now invisible  

And in some ways, Natives who live in cities are still invisible. Because while we know that today a lot of Native folks live urban lives, we don’t actually know how many. 

Like the 2020 US census found that nearly 7 in 10 people who identify as American Indian or Alaskan Native live in urban areas. 

But three years earlier, researchers at the Department of Housing and Urban Development had reported exactly the opposite. The math ain't mathing. 

It turns out that there are a couple things going on here.

For one, on the census, the American Indian category includes anyone with indigenous ancestry from anywhere in the Americas, not just what's now the US. 

Like, two of the most common identities reported in 2020 were Aztec and Maya, groups that go back hundreds or even thousands of years down in Mexico, our brothers from down under. 

But second, the census reflects how many people self-identified as having indigenous ancestry, which doesn't necessarily mean someone is a tribal member. 

Like in 2023, the Cherokee Nation had 450,000 enrolled members. And the smaller Cherokee bands, the United Cuba Band and the Eastern band, each had more than 14,000 members. 

Nothing to sneeze at, but over three times that many people had reported Cherokee ancestry on the census. 

What is it with the math around here?

Well, some of that discrepancy comes from different definitions of who counts as Cherokee.

It's impossible to know how many of those 1.5 million people who claim Native ancestry actually meet the requirements for tribal membership versus how many of them have heard a family story about their great great grandma, who was a Cherokee princess. 

Cuz actually, the Cherokee never had princesses. 

The point is, nobody's 100% sure how many Native people today live in cities  

Not even me, and I usually know everything. 

Side note, to this day, Native people living in cities sometimes get described as urban Indians. But that can create a kind of false dichotomy between city Indians and res Indians. 

While urban Indians don't really exist, Native people experiencing urban life do. 

Besides, there are Indians living everywhere, even in space. 

Who let you up there, Chief? You see ET anywhere?

And you might be like, "Che, who cares if we don't know the exact number? We know its a lot, isn't that enough? Can't you just be happy?"

But here's the thing, not being counted matters. Policies are only as good as the data they're informed by. If we don't have the data, then we don’t know how much money to allocate to important programs, which is a big deal when Natives living in cities experience poverty and unemployment at higher rates than other Americans, among other difficulties. 

Take the Indian Health Service, the federally funded health care provider for members of federally recognised tribes.

Despite the high population of Native people in urban areas, only 1% of IHS's budget is earmarked for cities. So, urban clinics are few and far between. 

Even if a Native person does live in a city with one of these clinics, lack of time and money can make it hard to get to one. 

But urban Indian organisations are striving to change that. 

For example, the National Urban Indian Family Coalition, a group of 40 non-profits, led the hashtag #StatisticallySigniicantCampaign, which encouraged Natives and cities to respond to the 2020 US census so that their numbers could be counted and their needs met. And so that maybe one day the math can math. 

And that points to something huge that the BIA didn't anticipate. 

Native people didn't just disappear in cities. Instead, these seemingly invisible Native people looked for and found each other. 

Despite many tribal differences, they found common ground and used it to voice their collective power. 

Intertribal activist organisations like the Red Power Movement and its offshoot, the American Indian Movement, sprouted in cities during the 1960s an 70s, promoting Native pride and organising protests to call attention to injustices. 

People from many different Native nations came together to assert their treaty rights, improve living conditions, and fill in the gaps where the government had failed them. 

Like in the late 1960s, members of the American Indian Movement in Minneapolis, Minnesota, tried to figure out how to address problems for Native folks like housing discrimination and isolation from their cultures. 

And in 1973, Little Earth was born, the first and only subsidised housing complex in the US to give preference to Natives. 

To this day, Little Earth offers services for Native residents like rides to school, food banks, and doctor visits, tutoring and support groups.

There's an urban farm that grows medicinal plants like sweetgrass and sage. 

A nightly community patrol to de-escalate conflict, an arts collective, seasonal ceremonies, and pow-wows and mentorship from elders. 

Today, Little Earth is home to about 1,000 residents from more than 30 Native nations, it's just one of many cross-tribal organisations and cultural centres that continue to maintain Native community in urban areas. 

So, relocation created a whole a new experience for Native people, one of managing their traditions and cultural identity while in an urban setting, and it caused Native people from totally different tribes to come together in new ways.

Sounds pretty good, right? But like many things, there's a flipside this. 

What if coming together across Native cultures actually made Natives less visible, not more? 

I'll let Cherokee scholar and activist Robert Thomas explain.

In the 1970s, he warned that Natives living in cities were at risk of being cut off from their cultures and the natural world. He feared that unique tribal identities would soon be replaced by a single idea of what it meant it means to be Indian. 

Like, instead of having New York style pizza, Chicago style pizza, and Detroit style, we just had pizza. 

This idea is called Pan-Indianism. It's a political philosophy, thats either positive or negative, depending on your perspective.

Some Native people see it as representing inter-tribal unity and working towards common goals, while others see it as a blending together of distinct tribal identities into generic sameness. 

To this day, Natives debate whether Pan-Indianism in cities is good or bad. Does banning together over a common Indianness support Native nations sovereignty or does it threaten it?

Scholar Sydney Anne Beckham argues this debate is missing the forest for the trees. It perpetuates "the idea that Indigenous people and cultures cannot exist... in urban spaces and that Indigenous land ends at city limits." 

Which as we've seen, couldn't be further from the truth. 

It's not the possibility of Native urban life that's up for debate. It's the quality of it. 

No matter their perspective, there's no denying that Native Americans are here in full force.

We're in cities just as much as we're on reservations, and we've refused to be invisible in a variety of ways, like by banning together to provide mutual support and by celebrating our uniqueness across cultures. 

Today, 50 years after relocation officially ended, we continue to define and redefine what it means to be Native in the city. 

As the Cheyenne and Arapaho writer Tommy Orange wrote, "The city made us new, and we made it ours."

Next time, we're dive into the unique histories of Alaskan Natives and Native Hawaiians, and I will see you then. 

Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course: Native American History, which was filmed at our studio in Indianapolis, Indiana, and was made with the help of all these nice people. If you want to help keep Crash Course free for everyone forever, you can join our community on Patreon.