Indians on the Move: Native American Mobility and Urbanization in the Twentieth Century by Douglas K. Miller (review)

in typical urban native histories, relocation is something that happened to Indigenous people, as if they had no agency. However, in Indians on the Move: Native American Mobility and Urbanization in the Twentieth Century, Douglas K. Miller flips the script, demonstrating how Native people often negotiated how relocation would impact their lives on their terms. He demonstrates that relocation didn’t just happen to Native people—they engaged in a complex process in order to make their lives as good as possible within a settler-colonial matrix. The book does not focus so much on numbers and policies impacting Native people’s relocation; instead, it sees “Indians as practitioners of competing modes of modernity, mobility, ingenuity, and even anonymity” (9). Above all, Miller demonstrates how Native people were mobile, engaging in Western modernity on their own terms. For instance, Miller tells us of an inmate at the El Reno Federal Reformatory in Oklahoma who wrote to the BIA relocation office in New Mexico and asked to be relocated upon his release (129).

Place is important to this book. While the majority of urban Native histories focus on one particular city, Miller tells us stories from a variety of places. We read the story of a single mother from the Mesquakie settlement in Tama, Iowa, who in 1953 wanted to move to Chicago in order to stay close to her homelands (107). He tells the story of Mary Newell, a Cheyenne woman who traveled with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show after attending the Carlisle Indian Boarding School and who helped form the American Indian Association in Manhattan in 1926. The book tells us of Haudenosaunee iron-workers who built the New York City skyscrapers in the early twentieth century and some who returned to rebuild in the aftermath of the 9/11 tragedy.

A unique feature is that Miller focuses on Indigenous people returning to the reservation. As Miller points out, “In most historical accounts of the twentieth century Indian urbanization, reservations tend to disappear once our Indian subjects arrive in the city. But in reality, reservations and ancestral lands remained ever visible in the rearview mirror” (161). Perhaps the best example of this reality is the story he shares of former principal chief of the Cherokee Nation Wilma Mankiller. Mankiller grew up in San Francisco, returning to Oklahoma in the late 1970s (179). Finally, while relocation impacted tribal nations in different ways, Miller demonstrates how the Navajo Nation proactively conducted research to make sure that their relocated citizens were doing well in the state of California (126–29).

Chapter 1 demonstrates how, in spite of the confining nature of the reservation and boarding schools, Natives continued to be mobile. Chapter 2 rewrites the history of why Native people traveled to urban spaces in the first place. It tells stories of Native people’s participation in World War II urban war production, showing their agency in coming to urban areas before the relocation program. Chapter 3 follows a similar path, revealing to the reader that Native people continued to shape their destinies and created Indigenous cultures in urban spaces in ways that the Bureau of Indian Affairs did not anticipate.

Chapter 4 tells social histories of urban Indian relocatees and demonstrates Indigenous initiative in urban spaces. Chapter 5 tells us about Native people’s attempts to integrate into urban societies deeply impacted by race and class. Chapter 6 flips the general narratives of urban relocatees who stayed in cities by revealing how Indigenous people began returning to their home reservations.

Indians on the Move is a needed contribution to the fields of Indigenous studies, mobility studies, and urban history and is a part of what I call the new urban Indigenous history. These histories assume that Native people belong in urban spaces, demonstrate how they reclaim these spaces, and illustrate how Native people do ordinary, everyday things in the city. These...