This article is part of an ongoing series of stories by ICT examining the complicated issues of Indigenous identity.
Kevin Abourezk
ICT
WHITE CLOUD, Kansas – It’s early September, and the cornstalks in the Kansas cornfield have grown tall, the ears long and ready to be harvested.
Not far away, an Ioway mother and her daughter stand over a boiling pot of water that’s hovering over a fire. They gently dip freshly picked ears of corn into the water in order to blanch them so people sitting nearby can more easily carve the kernels from them and prepare them for freezing.
Bringing her two daughters to participate in cultural activities like this community corn harvest is nothing new for Rebekka Schlichting, who grew up learning her Ioway peoples’ traditions.
But it’s a school night for her girls and their home in Lawrence, Kansas, is more than 80 miles south.
Sometimes holding onto traditions looks like two children sleeping in the back seat.
“I make it a priority in my life to keep these traditions alive through them and to keep them involved,” she said.
Schlichting isn’t alone in her efforts to keep herself and her children connected to their tribal roots despite being far from her people’s lands.
More than 70 percent of American Indian and Alaska Native people live in urban areas away from their tribal homelands, according to the National Council of Urban Indian Health’s analysis of the 2020 Census, compared with 45 percent in 1970 and 8 percent in 1940.
The mass migration of Indigenous people from their tribal homelands to urban communities began in earnest in 1953, when Congress began stripping tribes of their federal recognition in an attempt to force tribal citizens to assimilate. The policy, known as termination, led to many tribes losing their lands and their citizens losing federal benefits.
To facilitate this movement to urban areas, the Bureau of Indian Affairs offered housing and employment assistance to Native people who left their reservations for cities such as Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles and Seattle, under the Indian Relocation Act of 1956.
However, once there, Native people encountered many of the same problems they had endured on their reservations, including poverty, unemployment and homelessness.
Those who moved to cities and other communities outside their tribal homelands also struggled to remain connected to their cultural traditions, languages and tribal relatives.
Remaining connected
To assist urban Native people in reconnecting to their tribal roots, Native advocates in cities across the country have begun establishing cultural and language programs for urban Native people.
One such program is Healing Ribbons, a Native-led cultural revitalization nonprofit based in Omaha, Nebraska, that hosts sewing classes and other cultural programs primarily for Indigenous women.
Renee Sans Souci, a citizen of the Omaha Tribe of Nebraska, serves as the organization’s program coordinator. She said the organization creates a safe space for Indigenous women and their families, as well as Two-Spirit people. They host workshops led by Indigenous crafts makers, knowledge keepers and culture bearers, as well as talking circles, and traditional meals and ceremonies. Those programs, Sans Souci said, are meant to promote holistic wellbeing, and personal and economic development as those who make crafts often sell what they make.
“When our people come together during those open sewing nights, they’re in a safe space,” she said. “They feel good about what they’re doing, about being Native.”
Sans Souci said her work with Healing Ribbons also has helped her and her children remain connected to her Omaha tribal traditions while living in Lincoln, Nebraska, more than 100 miles from her tribal homelands in northeast Nebraska.
Born in Lincoln, Sans Souci said she moved back to the Omaha Reservation and to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota over the course of several decades after turning 18.
“Living on the reservation, I found my way back to spirituality, to Native traditional spirituality,” she said.
In 2013, she and her children moved back to Lincoln.
She said the birth of her first child in 1996 inspired her to absorb everything she could about her cultural and spiritual practices in order to be able to educate her children. In educating herself, she became knowledgeable enough to be able to share her own teachings with others and now serves as a cultural consultant with various organizations, as well as a traveling cultural educator.
To facilitate her work, she earned a bachelor’s degree in education from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
“That was a lot easier than going through the traditional teachings,” she said.
She said she’s never forced her children to take part in traditional ceremonies.
“It’s completely up to them if they set themselves on that path,” she said.
However, she has created an “altar” in her home where she and her children can burn sage or other traditional medicines and pray. And her children often accompany her when she travels around the country to conferences and traditional ceremonies to teach and learn.
“They learn and they see what people are doing, other Native people especially,” she said. “I’m trying to teach them respect for the land, other languages, other ways of being.”
In Lawrence, Kansas, Schlichting also is working to keep herself and her children connected to their tribal practices and traditions.
The University of Kansas journalism professor, filmmaker and entrepreneur said it’s been difficult to keep her daughters, ages six and 10, connected to their tribal roots being so far from the homelands of her tribe, the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska, in northeast Kansas.
Schlichting grew up on reservations in Kansas, including the Kickapoo Reservation in northeast Kansas, where she attended a tribal school that taught cultural lessons, including beadwork, regalia making, powwow singing and Kickapoo language. However, her mother grew up during a time when racism against Native people was rampant and led her to discourage her daughter from trying to connect to her Indigenous roots.
“She was very against me doing Native things … but she didn’t stop me,” she said. “I would just keep doing what I was doing.”
Schlichting served as a powwow princess for a couple of years for her tribe and today serves as the chair of the Iowa Tribe’s powwow committee. She also has taken part in Native American Church ceremonies since she was a teenager when she happened upon a ceremony taking place in a tipi and was invited to join.
“When I went to Native American Church, I really felt at home,” she said. “I felt like this is my place, this is where I need to be, and it was really special to me.”
Native American Church ceremonies typically begin at sunset and end at sunrise, and Schlichting often brings her daughters with her, including her six-year-old who gets sad when she can’t attend a ceremony.
“It’s pretty cool that they want that, and that they were able to grow up with that, grow up coming to the tipi,” she said. “They know that that’s their church and a safe place, a good home for them to be.”
Schlichting said it will be important for urban Native people as well as those living within their tribal homelands to continue to reconnect to their Indigenous traditions and culture in order to ensure the survival of those ways, as well as to help heal both Native and non-Native people.
“Our ways are ancient, and they’re important, and they are what’s going to save this world,” she said.
The Windy City then and now
Dorene Wiese, 76, moved from her Minnesota reservation to Chicago 55 years ago to attend college.
The White Earth Ojibwe woman serves as the CEO and founder of the American Indian Association of Illinois, which provides college counseling and financial aid technical assistance to students.
In the city, she met many Indigenous people who moved there with federal Indian relocation assistance and who had begun building educational, health and social programs to serve urban Native people.
“I was really fortunate to come at a time when all this was happening, this adaptation to urban life that people were making,” she said. “They were really the first adventurers to do that, to try to do that.”
However, many of those who moved to the city returned to their tribal communities after graduating from college and later became tribal council leaders or founded tribal colleges, drug and alcohol treatment programs and other social programs.
She said that aspect of the urban Indian relocation movement is often overlooked but important in understanding the unintended consequences of relocation.
But eventually, federal relocation assistance for Natives dried up, leaving many of the social programs established with those funds without financial support and unable to continue.
“We lost a lot of programs started during that era,” she said. “There’s no big interest in Natives in Chicago. It just has never happened. We’re such a small part of the population.”
The 2020 Census shows that 33,183 of 5.2 million people in Cook County, where Chicago is located, are American Indian and Alaska Native using the alone and in combination data. This does not include the Hispanic or Latino population data.
ICT uses the alone and in combination Census data as many Native people are multiracial, multitribal or both.
If Hispanic or Latino population numbers are included, the population of American Indian and Alaska Natives in Cook County jump to 89,438 or 1.7 percent of the population.
Wiese said the urban Indian clinic in the Chicago area is poorly funded with only one part-time doctor and no dentist, testing facilities or X-ray services.
She said despite the fact that most Native people live outside reservations, very little Indian Health Service funding supports urban Indian health programs.
Only 1.27 percent, or $90.4 million, of the IHS $7.1 billion budget went to urban Indian health, according to the National Council of Urban Indian Health analysis in June.
She said even tribes often refuse to support their urban tribal citizens, assuming they can rely on social programs in the cities that serve poor people. However, in forcing their citizens to compete for overburdened community resources tribes effectively deprive their citizens of the support they need, Wiese said.
She said she only knows of two tribes that offer support to urban Indians in Chicago, despite the city being home to one of the largest urban Native populations in America. Wiese said even those tribes often urge their urban citizens to move back to their tribal communities.
“There’s discrimination by our own tribes,” she said.
Wiese said discrimination against urban Indians extends into education as well, citing the closing of the Native American Educational Services College in Chicago in 2005 after the independently-controlled college failed to secure federal funding aimed at tribal colleges despite boasting an all-Indian administration and staff.
She said Chicago only has a few poorly funded Native-serving programs.
“Things are so bad in Chicago it’s hard to call them programs,” she said.
One such program that she said has helped urban Natives remain connected to Indigenous culture is the Black Hawk Performance Company, a nearly 40-year-old music and dance organization serving students. The program teaches children how to bead and drum and introduces them to local artists.
‘Pan-Indigenous’
Since the relocation era, many urban Native people have sought out reconnection to their traditional practices and Indigenous languages.
For some, it means finding ways to make those connections within their urban communities.
Sa’dekaronhes Esquivel, 46, Mohawk, lives in Seatac, Washington, a suburb of Seattle, but was born in New York state and grew up in Ganienkeh Territory, which describes itself as an “independent North American Indian state” that seceded from the United States following an occupation of Mohawk people in the late 1970s.
However, Esquivel grew up on the Colville Indian Reservation in north-central Washington.
He grew up taking part in powwows as his father was a singer and connected to their reservation community. Esquivel eventually made his way to Seattle, where he attended college to become an animator.
While he works with Indigenous creatives to design tabletop and video games, he said the lack of active Native organizations in the Seattle area means Native people don’t have many opportunities to connect to each other, except at powwows, which he attends mostly as an observer.
“I’m often there and I enjoy being with the community,” he said. “Without them it feels pretty bleak.”
While he hasn’t been able to maintain much connection to his Mohawk cultural roots, he said he considers himself “pan-Indigenous,” having grown up in a Native community that wasn’t his own and now living in a city where so many different tribal people are represented.
“When you grew up far away from your own culture, I think it’s still important to be involved in the local community in a respectful way,” he said. “There’s still a lot of value and camaraderie that can happen there.”
Traveling between two homes
For others, reconnecting involves returning to their tribal homelands to participate in ceremonies and celebrations, such as powwows.
Clem Crazy Thunder, Oglala Lakota, has lived in California far from his South Dakota homelands since 2019 and away from his reservation since he left for college in 1994.
The 49-year-old said he has become adept at finding and participating in Native-serving programs in all the urban communities where he’s lived.
“As a Native in an urban setting, you have to look for your culture, but it’s awesome when you do,” said Crazy Thunder, a drug and alcohol treatment counselor.
He tries to make it back to the Pine Ridge Reservation for ceremonies and funerals. He said being away from home has helped him better appreciate the cultural resiliency of his tribal community.
“People on the reservation may think that they’re losing culture, but they don’t realize what’s right in front of them, that there is complete culture there,” he said. “There is powerful culture there.”