Urban Indians and Ethnic Choices: American Indian Organizations in Minneapolis, 1920-1950

Abstract

W hen Dennis Banks, an initial founder of the American Indian Movement (A.I.M.), said in a 1976 interview that was part of the downfall, part of the destruction of the Indian community, he articulated one of the most commonly held assumptions about American Indians' experiences in cities.' Banks's statement is ironic, since A.I.M. and other Indian organizations of the 1960s and 1970s emerged from Indian communities that urbanization had helped create. A.I.M. began one evening in 1968 when several Indians met to try to prevent what they saw as discriminatory arrests of Indians in their south Minneapolis neighborhood. By organizing Indians living in specific communities to help each other, A.I.M. members were acknowledging that Indians in cities belonged to ethnic as well as geographic communities. A.I.M.'s first meeting, its further development of Minneapolis-area projects in education and housing, and its proliferation nationwide suggest that urbanization has helped to reinforce American Indian identity.2 Scholars studying recent American Indian history have exhibited a similar kind of historical shortsightedness. They generally share in Dennis Banks's assessment of the city as damaging to Indian communities. Because the federal government sponsored an urban relocation program for Indians in the 1950s, Indian urbanization is often treated as a by-product of misguided government policies.3 And the Red Power movement of the