Is Urban a Person or a Place? Characteristics of Urban Indian Country

Abstract

Is urban a person or a place? Urban is a place, a setting in which many Indian people at some time in their lives visit, “establish an encampment,” or settle into. Urban doesn’t determine self-identity, yet the urban area and urban experiences are the context and some of the factors that contribute to defining identity. The intent of this article is to delineate some of the general structural characteristics of urban Indian communities in the United States, and to indicate the ways in which urban communities interplay with individual and group identity. While most of the focused research for this discussion has been carried out since 1978 in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the principal examples given here are specific to this region, many of the comments also are applicable on a general level to other urban Indian communities such as those found in Seattle, Los Angeles, and Chicago. The work, for example, of Garbarino and Straus on Chicago, 1 Liebow on Phoenix, 2 Shoemaker on Minneapolis, 3 Bramstedt and Weibel-Orlando on Los Angeles, 4 Danziger on Detroit, 5 and Guillemin on Boston 6 indicates parSusan Lobo, a cultural anthropologist, is a consultant emphasizing research, advocacy, and project design, working primarily for American Indian tribes and community organizations in the United States and Central and South America. She has been the coordinator of Intertribal Friendship House’s Community History Project since 1978, and has taught at the University of California at Berkeley and at Davis.