UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA GRADUATE COLLEGE RESERVATION LIMITS: AMERICAN INDIAN URBANIZATION AND UPLIFT IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE FACULTY in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY By DOUGLAS K. MILLER Norman, Oklahoma 2014 RESERVATION LIMITS: AMERICAN INDIAN URBANIZATION AND UPLIFT IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY A DISSERTATION APPROVED FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY BY ______________________________ Dr. R. Warren Metcalf, Chair ______________________________ Dr. Robert Griswold ______________________________ Dr. Joshua Piker ______________________________ Dr. Robert Rundstrom ______________________________ Dr. Brian Hosmer © Copyright by DOUGLAS K. MILLER 2014 All Rights Reserved. Dedicated to all the American Indian people who defied limitations on how and where they could belong. Acknowledgements This study truly began at the University of Minnesota in Jeani O’Brien’s classroom. Her course in American Indian history was so powerful that it pried me away from a burgeoning music career that I had dreamed about since childhood. She nurtured my intellectual curiosity as I wandered around Minneapolis’s Franklin Street trying to bump into AIM leaders for a senior paper project. I firmly believe that she is responsible for opening my door to graduate study and setting me on a course that I would not have otherwise believed possible. Indeed, when I arrived at the University of Illinois at Chicago as a master’s student I was rough around the edges. This is where Brian Hosmer came in. I like to compare him to a great baseball team manager who has an eye for diamonds in the rough. Like a good baseball manager, he identified something in me worth cultivating, and played an active role in my development. Also, like a good baseball manager making a visit to the mound to check on his pitcher, he knew just when to get me out of a jam, and when to leave me in and allow me to pitch my way out of it. Indeed, I often propped Brian up as a father figure, a positive male role model to fill that void in my life. He is still there any time I need him. Finally I arrived in the steady tutelage of my dissertation advisor, R. Warren Metcalf. I went to the University of Oklahoma specifically to study with him, and he proved to be exactly what I needed in a graduate mentor. His calm, steady guidance often formed a rock that I swam toward when the waters seemed treacherous. He consistently demonstrated a fine sense of both humor and humility, and he always iv believed in my ideas. If I have in some small way lived up to these three primary mentors’ belief in my capacity, then I am satisfied. In addition to the fine mentorship of these three superb individuals, my work often received enthusiastic support from numerous professors who inspired my development as a graduate student. They include Robert Johnston, Corey Capers, Terry Rugeley, Ben Keppel, Sterling Evans, Joshua Piker, Robert Griswold, Robert Rundstrom, Steve Gillon, and David Wrobel. Beyond my home departments, a handful of scholars deserve acknowledgement for encouraging my work. They include Daniel Cobb, Coll Thrush, Nicolas Rosenthal, Colleen O’Neill, Fred Hoxie, Larry Nesper, and Sherry Smith. Additionally, I owe a special thank you to Ada Deer, Matthew Pilcher, and Father Peter Powell for sharing their histories with me. Finally, I benefitted from the reliable friendship and support of my graduate student cohort at the University of Oklahoma, especially Brandi Hilton-Hagemann, Julie Stidolph, Justin Castro, Matt Pearce, Jeff Fortney, Rowan Steineker, Bryan Rindfleisch, Gary Moreno, and Dustin Mack. I was ambitious in my research agenda, and therefore fortunate to have numerous invaluable fellowships and grants provide assistance. First, the extended support of the Hudson Family Fellowship rendered my graduate study experience at the University of Oklahoma much easier, and provided me a motivating initial promise to keep. My research trips received generous support from the American Philosophical Society Phillips Fund for Native American Research, The Anne Hodges and Wayne Morgan Dissertation Research Fellowship, The Robberson Research Grant, and the University of Oklahoma Graduate Student Senate Research Grant. Additionally, the v University of Oklahoma History Department provided helpful support in the way of research and conference funding. Finally, my study received especially valuable support from a Newberry Library Short-Term Resident for Individual Research Fellowship. At the Newberry Library I enjoyed the excellent care of Diane Dillon, Daniel Greene, and Scott Stevens. Looking beyond the academic network, and closer to home, my loving family provided me the fortitude to endure this arduous process. They endowed me with more support than I can possibly capture in a short acknowledgements section. My father and mother-in law Chris and Mary von Alt consistently offered love, support, respite, good music, and good food. My stepfather Richard Ratliff has also provided steady love and support throughout this process. My brother Nicholas Miller has for most of my life inspired me with his strength, wisdom, and determination, despite being the younger sibling. My mother, Donna Ratliff, deserves her own section. She has worked tirelessly in support of my endeavors, from a child to a young man to adulthood. She labored long hours and fought to pull my brother and I from a desperate situation, and she succeeded. None of this would have been possible without her love and protection. It has been hard on her to have me pulled away for so long, but each day I carry her legacy and example in a different history that I safeguard in my heart and mind—the one about making sacrifices. Finally, my beautiful wife and best friend (well, not counting our two dogs, Holland and Magnolia), Exa von Alt, is many, many things to me. But above all else, she is my muse. I sing for her as she eternally points the way toward happiness. vi Throughout this process I never felt untethered from her patience, calm, and understanding, and that is a credit to her. Perhaps only a lyric from a favorite song can encapsulate my feeling about her: “And it’s hello babe, with your guardian eyes so blue. Hey my baby, don’t you know our love is true.” vii Table of Contents Acknowledgements .......................................................................................................... iv Abstract ............................................................................................................................ ix Introduction—Painting a New Landscape: Native American Mainstreaming in the Twentieth Century ................................................................................................. 1 Chapter One—“The Bear and How He Went Over the Mountain”: Native American Mobility and Modernity, 1880s-1930s ................................................................ 21 Chapter Two—The MacArthur Shift: Native American War Industry Work and the Roots of Relocation ............................................................................................. 70 Chapter Three—“These People Come and Go Whenever They Please”: Negotiating Relocation in Postwar (Native) America .......................................................... 110 Chapter Four—“Relocating is Not Easy”: Indian Initiative In Urban America ........... 150 Chapter Five—Suffering in the City: Relocation’s Catastrophic Potential and the Problem of “Success” ........................................................................................ 209 Chapter Six—“They Always Come Back”: Urban Indians’ Return to and Influence on a Changing Indian Country .................................................................................. 250 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 292 References ..................................................................................................................... 301 viii 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