Truths held to be self-evident are good to recognize. Native people have traveled far and wide and adaptation has been the nugget of resilience. This core value and ability is amply evidenced in the urbanization experience that has become reality for so many Native people.
We remember not long ago, when the Indian activist movement was in its heyday, the way that people tended to separate themselves according to reservation or urban identities. That attitude seems to be receding; most everyone these days has shared some urban experience. The tendency now seems to place all experience in a continuum of reality. Indian people, culture and identity sustain, regardless of time and place.
Consider “Urban Voices: the Bay Area American Indian Community.” This recently published book (The University of Arizona Press) compiles some 90 narratives and many other documents of an excellent project that brings to life an important slice of the American Indian urban experience. Edited by noted activist-scholar Susan Lobo (as coordinating editor), with the collaboration of a wide range of Native people, the book chronicles the relocation and urbanization experience of several generations of Indians who migrated to the San Francisco Bay area since the 1930s, settling into an urban life that has become familiar to hundreds of thousands of Native people.
The ultimate effects of relocation of Indian peoples to urban areas are not easy to gauge. Certainly, the moving away from community and homeland is often a traumatic experience. The impressive element is how much Indian people did (an do) for themselves, to help each other get settled and become adept at surviving and even thriving in a new, constantly developing community.
Relocation of Indians to urban areas began in earnest in the years immediately after World War II, when then Commissioner of Indian Affairs Dillon Myer commanded an intense policy of what contributor Ray Moisa calls “the four gospels according to Myer ? termination, relocation, assimilation and acculturation.” No doubt, the federal relocation policy had its own intents. It was a policy made for the times, (the 1940s and early 1950s), when politicians of all parties resolved to “dissolve the special trust relationship between Indians and the federal government.” Myer, as Moisa points out, was ripe for the job; he was the same Dillon Myer who directed the War Relocation Authority that “uprooted from their homes tens of thousands of Japanese descendants” and placed them in virtual concentration camps during World War II. In the Native context, the carrot on the stick approach sought to introduce the idea that there was no “future on the reservations ? [but] ? limitless bounty in the city.” The reality, of course, was quite different and the ultimate result was that, largely, Indians had to make do for themselves. Often left to drift once the few months of transitional assistance was cut off, relocated Indians found themselves “in an alien environment, often far from home, their extended families and tribal territories.”
But the book does not dwell on the official history of that and subsequent times. It focuses on the stories of the Indian people themselves. Lobo and her fellow editors (Marilyn LaPlante St. Germaine, Sharon Mitchell Bennett, Gerri Lira, Charlene Betsillie, Joyce Keoke) call their effort, a “sharing of the experience of participation” – a participation that created community among Indians of many nations, even in what would have seemed an unlikely place. The approach of the book is not academic. It is perhaps more respectful, uniquely so, because it does not analyze; it simply lets people tell their own story. And what a great and overdue story it is.
Wilma Mankiller, the former Cherokee chief, recalls how the people of the original San Francisco Indian Center assisted her family when it relocated from Oklahoma. Later in her youth, “I moved to Oakland and the Intertribal Friendship House became my sanctuary during a tumultuous time in my life. The IFH was more than an organization. It was the heart of a vibrant tribal community.” The book brings alive the voices and visions of well-loved people, such as Bill Wahpepah, whose heartfelt style of leadership was a breath of fresh air during a time of much militant macho. Many others participated, 90 in all, many perhaps lesser known, but whose contributions add to the “bundle of memory” that is very much worth recording and preserving.
Early discussions for the project that would become the book began in the mid-1970s, when the Community History Project was set up. By all accounts, widespread participation by community members and the active commitment of the core editorial group made the book possible. As the project grew, families and individuals would donate materials, photographs and other documents. Organized into a practical five-section format, “Urban Voices” traces the history of relocation of one community, the San Francisco Bay area. However the model could just as easily apply to many other urban centers, whether Los Angeles, Minneapolis or New York. Congratulations to Susan Lobo and the extended group of editors and contributors who created this important work. They have provided a useful approach that enriches the Indian experience and provides that most necessary quality of overcoming longing and despair with that “network of relatedness” that creates community and hope.
