Healing Through Grief: Urban Indians Reimagining Culture and Community in San Jose, California

Abstract

The American Indian Holocaust exhibit is a community project organized as part of the American Indian Alliance, a group of urban Indians,1 who first came together in the San Jose area in 1993. Rifts and tensions within the Indian community encouraged Laverne Morrissey, a strong, soft-spoken, articulate Paiute woman to form this group to bring the different factions back together.2 Al Cross (Mandan-Hidatsa), an American Indian history instructor at one of the local community colleges, and Roberto Ramirez (Indio/Chicano), a social worker for Santa Clara County, organize this annual exhibit. They lead a group of Indians and non-Indians who have put this exhibit on display—each year open to the public for a week or so—