Young Once, Indian Forever: Youth Gangs in Indian Country

In the summer of 1960 John and Debbie Blueshirt boarded a bus with their two small children and left their home on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. They headed for San Francisco as participants in the Bureau of Indian Affairs' (bia) Indian Relocation Program, and the lives of this small Indian family were about to change forever.

The Indian Relocation Program was a central part of the bia's intensified efforts during the 1960s to move Indians off the reservations and into eight metropolitan areas of the United States. The program placed Indians in urban locations and offered them employment assistance and vocational training. It also offered heartache and frustration to many of the Indians who participated. For some, it was a dead-end street.

When John, Debbie, and their children arrived at the Greyhound bus station on Seventh Street, they felt the mist from the San Francisco fog. The unfamiliar chill made them want to get back on a bus and go home, but they were in the big city now, armed with little besides the government's promise of a new and better life.

Their first night was spent in a hotel south of downtown. The next day they met with a bia counselor at the relocation office. The counselor helped them complete their paperwork and then drove them to a large apartment building at 50 Church Street, where the bia housed the Indian families in the program. The building was full of Indians from all over Indian country: Navajos, Blackfeet, Warm Springs, Apaches, and others.

Relocation was hard on these Indian families. They were given a meager stipend, and both parents had to work menial jobs while going to school. Emotions ran high, and tensions flared. The young parents often commiserated at the Indian Center and at Indian bars in efforts to drown their sorrows and fears. There were also the late-night gatherings in different apartments with singing, beer drinking, and violence.

Two years after his arrival in San Francisco, John Blueshirt lost his life in a brawl at the 3gs, an Indian bar across the bay in Oakland. It was a tragic loss for Debbie and their children, John Jr. and Lisa. They were alone now. Debbie buried John in the Bay Area, which prevented her from packing up the kids and heading back to South Dakota. She needed to be near John and did not want to leave him cold and alone in a foreign world. For the time being, this was home.

Eighteen years later, after managing to raise her children in San Francisco, Debbie died of complications from diabetes. She was buried near John in a cemetery south of San Francisco. It was 1980, and John Jr. was twenty-five, married and with a son, Michael, who had dearly loved his grandmother and took her death very hard. As he grew older, Michael was plagued with questions about his identity and was wrought with a desire to belong. His father and mother were unable to meet his needs, and Michael began getting into trouble with the police, eventually turning to gang membership for support. Finally, Michael's parents and the juvenile court decided that it would be best for Michael to move to the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota and live with relatives there, away from gang violence.

Scenarios similar to Michael Blueshirt's have been repeated many times on many different reservations in an effort to get Indian youth away from gang violence in cities. Indian youth are sent back to the reservations that their parents left two generations before, where there are supposedly no gangs. But in doing so, the seeds of youth gangs are often brought to the reservation.

Not unlike mainstream society of the United States, Indian Country faces new challenges regarding the values, mores, and behavior of its young people. Since their first encounters...