Evelyn Schlatter

I’m from rural Colorado, but I’ve lived in four urban areas, three of which are in the American West. I’ve traveled extensively as well, and something that always strikes me is the different “feel” of different places and how hard it can be to carve a place for yourself in an urban area, especially if you don’t know anybody. Or maybe you have cultural and ethnic roots that aren’t urban-based. It was hard for me–a white, middle-class woman–moving alone to cities where I didn’t know anyone. But what must that be like for people who come from, say, reservations, and from cultures that emphasize family ties that extend over generations?

The National Urban Indian Family Coalition just released a report titled “Urban Indian America: The Status of American and Alaska Native Children and Families Today.”

I’m particularly interested in how urbanization affects people whose historical and cultural roots may not be “cosmopolitan” and may not be “white.” As a graduate student at the University of New Mexico, I worked as an editor at the New Mexico Historical Review and one of my colleagues who worked there with me is Indian. She also worked at the Albuquerque Indian Center while she was going to school and raising a child.

Through her, I learned a bit about how cities can create a sense of isolation among Native peoples, and how indigenous history and culture is often rooted in landscape, rather than concrete. My colleague talked about how the Indian Center provided a focal point for Indian peoples in Albuquerque, and that it helped many retain a sense of identity in an often faceless urban environment. And she told me that the Center worked with other urban Indian centers, networking and trying to develop resources for a growing Native population in urban areas. So I read this recent study with interest, wanting to see what the NUIFC found and what it might propose to better connect urban to rural.

The NUIFC is a coalition of two dozen urban Indian centers that are working to build bridges between urban and rural Indian communities. The organization is conducting a multi-year research project that hopefully will provide a snapshot of urban Indians’ socioeconomic status, well being, and overall experiences.

What the study reveals is that urban Indians outnumber rural, and that compared to the general population, they have a 38 percent higher rate of accidental death; 54 percent higher rate of diabetes; 126 percent higher rate of liver disease and cirrhosis; 178 percent higher rate of alcohol-related deaths; and a poverty rate of 20.3 percent, compared to 12.7 percent for the general population.

According to the U.S. census, in 2000, 4.3 million people in the U.S. identified as American Indian and Alaska Native alone or in combination. 61 percent of these Native people did not reside on reservations or other Native lands, up from 38 percent in 1970.

Of the major metropolitan areas in the country that have the largest percentage of Native peoples, nine are located in the West. These include Albuquerque, Anchorage, Oakland, Denver, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Portland, Seattle, and Tucson.

The study notes that

Native people have resided in cities and similar settlements for hundreds of years (some before contact with Europeans), but the process of urbanization for many Native people was accelerated by the federal Indian termination and relocation policy in the 1950s and beyond. This policy led to the termination of many Indian tribes and the relocation of almost 200,000 Native people from reservations to cities and was specifically designed to end the ‘Indian problem’ and reduce the need for the federal government to fund services for reservation-based Native people…The stated goal of the relocation policy was to ensure that Native people who agreed to be relocated would build new lives in the cities. The result of the policy was that many Native people (and their descendants) never returned to their home reservation and their sense of specific tribal identity was significantly diminished.

So what’s to be done? The NUIFC advocates a variety of goals, recognizing that there is no one archetypal urban Indian, but that many Native peoples living in urban areas do face some of the same issues. Most of these goals are focused on building support networks for urban-based Indians and working with tribal governments to create more connections between urban and non-urban Indian peoples. The NUIFC also hopes to help Indians sustain indigenous values and culture within urban communities.

I thought about my former colleague in Albuquerque when I finished the report and I’m glad the Indian Center in that city is so active, trying to help people find their paths in strange, often alienating environments. And I hope that this study provides ideas for creative solutions to the myriad issues many Native peoples often face in urban areas.