Indians on the move : Native American mobility and urbanization in the twentieth century

Miller, Douglas K. 1976- (author.).

Summary: 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.--

Record details

OCLC: on1086610744
ISBN: 1469651386
ISBN: 9781469651385
ISBN: 1469651378
ISBN: 9781469651378
ISBN: 1469651408
ISBN: 9781469651408
ISBN: 1469651394
ISBN: 9781469651392
Physical Description: 1 online resource
remote
Published: Chapel Hill :University of North Carolina Press,[2019]
Publisher: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [2019]
Copyright: ©2019

Content descriptions

Bibliography:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents:

Painting a new landscape: Native American mobility in the twentieth century -- The bear and how he went over the mountain: confinement and the boarding school generation -- Who can say they are apathetic and listless now?: war industry work and the roots of the relocation program -- These people come and go whenever they please: negotiating relocation in postwar Native America -- I can learn any kind of work: Indian initiative in urban America -- Relocation has degraded Indian people: urbanization's catastrophic potential -- They always come back: urban Indians' return to and influence on a changing Indian country -- A place made of sorrow?