Reservation Limits: American Indian Urbanization and Uplift in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

This dissertation takes a macro view of American Indian urbanization and off-reservation employment across the twentieth century, and does so through a wide-angle lens that is not tribe or destination specific. While the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ mid-twentieth-century urban relocation program rests at the narrative’s center, I have divorced it from the era’s larger termination policy in order to evaluate it as a distinct historical phenomenon. Rather than emphasize Indian diasporic movement away from reservations merely as a product of BIA machinations, I instead discuss how Native people dictated the terms of relocation while impacting the program’s outcome in profound and unexpected ways. While urbanization undeniably resulted in catastrophe for many Indians, scholars have mostly failed to explore an equally important outcome in which a substantial number of Indians benefitted from urban experiences while gaining important skills to improve their respective tribes’ ability to successfully exercise self-determination and political sovereignty in the modern era. In their collective refusal to be starved and stereotyped into reservation corners, Native people adapted to changing historical currents while nurturing an Indian uplift impulse that stretched back to the reservation period, when the United States federal government seemingly finished a long project of cordoning Indians off from society at large. Drawing on extensive archival research and numerous oral history interviews, this dissertation ultimately strives to position American Indians as cosmopolitan peoples who throughout the twentieth century defied reservation limits and resisted restrictions on how and where they could belong in the wider world.