Reimagining Indian Country: Native American Migration and Identity in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles

5. Being Indian in the City: American Indian Urban Organizations

103 Chapter {5} Being Indian in the City American Indian Urban Organizations On a balmy autumn day in September 1964 the Los Angeles Indian Center sponsored the annual Indian Day festivities in Sycamore Grove Park, just north of downtown Los Angeles. The event honored the founder of the Indian Center and other former council members who, over the years, had passed away. A crowd numbering in the thousands turned out and was entertained by a number of Indian performances that included dancing by Joe Whitecloud Tafoya and his family, the knife and tomahawk throwing of Skeeter Vaughn and Little Fawn, and Western rock and roll music performed by Peter McDonald and Irish Pup. Indian Day reflected the vibrancy and enthusiasm of the ever-growing American Indian population of the Greater Los Angeles area. It had done so since the first celebration of Indian Day at Sycamore Grove in 1928.1 The annual Indian Day festivities are just one example of the enduring work undertaken by urban American Indian organizations throughout the twentieth century. American Indian migrants came together to address concerns relating to both national issues and life in the city in the decades before World War II. These clubs were some of the first American Indian– controlled organizations in the country. They provided Progressive Era reform-minded American Indians with ways to “be Indian” in places that were dominated by non-Indians and often far away from tribal lands and communities. Members also were able to maintain the “respectable” norms of American society learned during their years in federal boarding schools. Club members in this way became part of what historian Frederick E. Hoxie has described as a generation of Indians grappling for the first time with the meanings of “being Indian” in modern society and attempting to “define ways in which their communities and their traditions might be Being Indian in the City 104 valued in a new setting.”2 Members of early-twentieth-century urban Indian organizations complicated notions of American progress and rejected demands to abandon Indian culture even as they sought acceptance by non-Indians, much as their contemporaries working on reservations did. American Indian organizations in cities quickly grew in number after World War II to match the rapid increase in Indian urbanization. Native people built on prewar precedents and organized clubs and groups where they could socialize, plan group activities, address national issues of concern to Native people, and provide welfare services to poor Indians. These groups primarily were organized and patronized by working- and middleclass Indians living relatively comfortable lives. In their charitable efforts and some of their social activities they also drew in Indians who were struggling with life in the city. These organizations helped to foster new ways of being Indian in the city that combined tribal and intertribal identities with their specific experiences and the circumstances of urban life.3 Together, both prewar and postwar urban Indian organizations worked to define a reimagined Indian Country. American Indians who traveled to cities from Indian reservations in the first half of the twentieth century often left harsh conditions that included crippling deficiencies in health, housing, education, and economic development (as discussed in Chapter 1). Federal Indian policy worked to steadily erode the tribal land base, develop natural resources for the benefit of non-Indians, and attack Indian cultures.4 The city offered some respite from federal policy, but in turn Native people found a world in which nonIndians dominated social, cultural, and political life and where the presence of living Indian people garnered little consideration or respect. The anxieties brought on by industrialization, immigration, and the end of the “frontier” encouraged some Americans to look inward and to reevaluate American national identity in ways that had implications for Native people. Progressive Era reformers saw Indian experiences as an essential precursor to contemporary society and sought to cultivate the “purity” of that earlier era in all persons to teach them the values of America. New organizations such as the Boy Scouts and the Camp Fire Girls took up this project by emphasizing the natural environment and developing activities based on Indian stereotypes. This fascination was mostly limited to imagined Indians of old, however. Some Americans saw contemporary Indians as “exotic” and “noble,” but only if they provided tourists and scholars with Being Indian in the City 105 the sense of the past that was expected and unencumbered by the trappings...