Native Americans in Cities

American popular culture has tended to depict Native Americans either as residents of an untamed wilderness or on reservations isolated from modern American life. Actually, a majority of Native Americans today live in the urban areas of the United States. Beginning with the founding of American cities and towns, Native people migrated to these population centers and adapted to the conditions of urban life.

Once Europeans arrived in North America, they often settled in areas first identified and inhabited by Native peoples. In subsequent years, disease and interethnic violence drastically reduced Native populations. Moreover, for the most part, European American settlers preferred to draw physical boundaries between themselves and Native residents. Some Native people, however, chose to adapt and integrate into European [Page 519]American society. Within the English colonies, for instance, Native Americans converted to Christianity and clustered in “praying towns” that allowed them to preserve their lands and retain aspects of Native community, even as they adopted English culture and its institutions. In other cases, such as in the missions and pueblos of Spanish California, Native labor and knowledge were essential to the founding and development of cities and towns. Native people there held crucial jobs as masons, carpenters, plasterers, tanners, shoemakers, blacksmiths, millers, bakers, cooks, spinners, shepherds, and vaqueros.

Over the course of the 20th century, the small populations of Native Americans in towns and cities were augmented by growing migration streams. Much of this movement originated within the immediate region of urban areas and was connected to the availability of wage labor. In New York City, for instance, Mohawk Indians from upstate New York and Canada became famous for their work as steelworkers on bridges and skyscrapers. Railroads and commercial ships took on Indians as traveling laborers, so that Chicago, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, and other regional transportation centers became familiar places to Native people. Expanding industrial centers in the American Southwest, Pacific Northwest, and Great Lakes regions hired Indians for a variety of mill, construction, and factory jobs. Cities also became destinations for Indian traders, who found a market for Native products such as crafts, fish, and other wild foods that could be transported by horse, car, or train. Some of these migrants considered the trip to the city a sojourn and planned to return to their reservations eventually. A woman from the Winnebago Reservation in Nebraska expressed this succinctly, when interviewed in 1928 while visiting Sioux City, Iowa: She explained that she and other members of her tribe did not live in the city, but only stayed there because they could get jobs.

During World War I, Native people joined the throngs of Americans seeking wartime work in urban centers; then in the Great Depression they were part of the exodus from the Dust Bowl states that sought refuge in Western cities. It was World War II, however, that was the greatest turning point for Native American urbanization. Native American veterans and defense plant workers experienced life in urban areas, as well as good wages, leading many to seek opportunities in cities when the war ended. While U.S. Census figures are believed to be far too low, nonetheless they give some sense of the growing force of Native American urbanization. In 1940, census takers counted 24,000 Native Americans in cities, which was 7 percent of the Native American population. Ten years later, in 1950, the census count climbed to over 56,000, or 13 percent of all Native Americans.

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