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

Conclusion: Indian Country, ReImagined: Cities, Towns, and Indian Reservations into the Twenty-First Century

155 Conclusion Indian Country, Reimagined Cities, Towns, and Indian Reservations into the Twenty-First Century The American Indian Resource Center (AIRC) at the County of Los Angeles Library in Huntington Park celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2004. It was established as one of four ethnic studies resource centers in 1969, and it has since developed the largest county library collection of American Indian materials in the country. Local schoolchildren, American Indian community members, and scholars regularly take advantage of the AIRC’s books, periodicals, microfilm, newspapers, videotapes and DVDs, audiocassettes and compact disks, vertical file of more than 800 subject folders, and the only complete sets of the Indian Census Records and Records of the Indian Claims Commission outside of the National Archives and Records Administration. The AIRC also bills itself as an “information referral center” to American Indians in Greater Los Angeles that helps urban Native people stay informed on contemporary issues relating to health, education, employment, law, economic development, politics, culture, and community activities.1 The library also has faced a number of serious challenges. Library administrators consistently failed to find qualified Indian librarians or even directors familiar with issues in Indian Country between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s. Budget cuts in the 1980s eliminated funding for the center’s only two staff positions, a library assistant and a library aide to the director, as well as for a county-level ethnic resource center coordinator , who had worked to make sure that each center was being properly served by the county. The distance between the county library management and the AIRC grew, and some of the most basic library and archival management practices were neglected. Michael McLaughlin (Winnebago) later served as AIRC director. He noted, for instance, that collection development lagged for years at a time, so that “there were a lot of disserta- 156 Conclusion tions and theses from the late 1970s to [about] 1985 and then suddenly you have no dissertations for ten years.” McLaughlin was nonetheless hopeful following a 2005 meeting with the directors of the other County of Los Angeles Public Library ethnic resource centers and the county librarian that included discussions of issues such as funding, classification of materials , collection development, and preservation. It was the first time that the county librarian had visited an ethnic resource center outside of a public event, as far as anyone could remember.2 The history of the AIRC helps illustrate the inroads American Indians have made into urban areas across the United States and also how challenges still face their communities. The AIRC came about in an atmosphere of rising urban Indian populations, national and grassroots Indian activism , and government and public support for urban Indian programs, including many of the social service organizations that served Indian people. That support began to fade over subsequent decades even as urban Indian populations continued to grow. Indians in cities have increasingly been forced to regroup and seek creative ways to address their needs, while learning from their experiences and those of earlier generations of urban migrants. All of the themes that have helped define the American Indian populations of the country’s urban areas—migration to the city, the diversity of life and work experience, the creation of urban Indian organizations, struggles for visibility, and social mobility—persist as the new millennium continues to unfold. The AIRC also exists within a much larger network of places important to Native people that expands throughout the city, the region, and even the country. Much of this book has focused on the experiences of American Indians within urban, metropolitan areas. It has examined the migrations of Indians to U.S. cities, the experiences of urban Indian life, and the formation of groups and organizations that fostered urban Indian identity, culture, and community. In doing so, it follows patterns long established by histories of immigrant communities that focus on the new lives established by migrants at their destination points.3 Such an approach also resembles the vast majority of scholarship on postconquest Indian history that regards Indian reservations, boarding schools, and cities as bounded and all-encompassing.4 The increasingly complex relationships that have developed between cities, towns, rural areas, and Indian reservations throughout the country are unaccounted for in this model. Cities have not simply become destinations to Native people. They also are important points on networks across which Indians move with regularity. 157 Conclusion In...