Reimagining Indian Country

Native American Migration and Identity in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles

Nicolas G. Rosenthal

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780807869994
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

For decades, most American Indians have lived in cities, not on reservations or in rural areas. Still, scholars, policymakers, and popular culture often regard Indians first as reservation peoples, living apart from non-Native Americans. In this book, Nicolas Rosenthal reorients our understanding of the experience of American Indians by tracing their migration to cities, exploring the formation of urban Indian communities, and delving into the shifting relationships between reservations and urban areas from the early twentieth century to the present. With a focus on Los Angeles, which by 1970 had more Native American inhabitants than any place outside the Navajo reservation, Reimagining Indian Country shows how cities have played a defining role in modern American Indian life and examines the evolution of Native American identity in recent decades. Rosenthal emphasizes the lived experiences of Native migrants in realms including education, labor, health, housing, and social and political activism to understand how they adapted to an urban environment, and to consider how they formed--and continue to form--new identities. Though still connected to the places where indigenous peoples have preserved their culture, Rosenthal argues that Indian identity must be understood as dynamic and fully enmeshed in modern global networks.

CHAPTER 1
SETTLING INTO THE CITY

American Indian Migration and Urbanization, 1900–1945

Romaldo LaChusa was born in 1883 and raised on the Mesa Grande Indian Reservation, an impoverished rural farming community in northern San Diego County. LaChusa attended a government-run day school on the reservation as a child and then at the age of sixteen transferred to the Perris Indian School for the next four years. LaChusa enrolled at the Sherman Institute in 1902, a new federal Indian boarding school just east of Los Angeles in the town of Riverside. LaChusa graduated from the eighth grade and took a job on the school’s instructional farm, leaving a few years later for the city. LaChusa had no trouble finding steady work once in Los Angeles, especially as the population of the city grew and its economy expanded to create thousands of jobs in the industrial and service sectors. LaChusa was living near downtown and working as a landscape gardener by 1917. Two years later LaChusa married his first wife, Annie, who was a California Indian. The couple relocated to Torrance, an ethnically diverse industrial area near the coast, where LaChusa worked as a laborer at Llewellyn Iron Works alongside Mexican immigrants and several Indians from Arizona. By 1924 LaChusa had married his second wife, Margaret, a California Indian who was born on the Torrez-Martinez Reservation. The two moved to Hollywood, and LaChusa returned to work as a gardener. In 1950, at the age of sixty-seven, LaChusa retired to the city where he had spent most of his life.¹

Most American Indian Studies scholars who have recognized the migration of Native people to cities in the twentieth century have characterized Indian urbanity as a post–World War II phenomenon. Historians have referred to the dislocation of the war years and postwar federal relocation programs in particular and argue that they sparked the first significant movements of Native people to urban centers. Others have noted the presence of a prewar population, or even suggested that postwar migration was an intensification of earlier trends. These scholars have proceeded to focus on the postwar era and provide little sense of what Indian life in the city was like before 1945, and how these migratory patterns might have shaped Indian Country as a whole.² Scholars also have missed the presence of American Indians who often traveled, lived, and worked alongside other peoples of color in the burgeoning cities of North America.³

The stories of Romaldo LaChusa and thousands of others illustrate a longer history of American Indians reimagining Indian Country to include the cities of the United States. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the American Indian population of urban areas throughout the country steadily increased. American Indians traveled to cities and their surrounding areas for thousands of new jobs in the agricultural, industrial, and service sectors. This migration was often regional, as Native people were most likely to take advantage of economic opportunities in the towns and cities closest to their established lands and communities. Built on decades of participation by wage laborers, these movements were often a logical extension of Native people’s more established social patterns rooted in tribal life. American Indians in towns and cities tended to be concentrated in domestic service and unskilled occupations, as they were in rural areas, and these occupations offered the lowest pay under the least favorable of working conditions. Native people also found more skilled and better-paying positions, however, enabling them to settle into the multiethnic, working- and middle-class neighborhoods that came to characterize many U.S. cities. When great numbers of Indian people traveled to urban areas for defense work and military service, there was already a long history of urban American Indian migration. The history of American Indians in American cities from 1900 to 1945 is marked by migrations in correlation to urban expansion. Seen in this light, Indian migration was part of the development of urban America in this era, as well as the foundation for the expansion and development of American Indian communities in cities after the war. American Indians were finding and settling into the cities of the United States as early as the first decades of the twentieth century, beginning a long process of reimagining Indian Country.

American Indians have always lived in the towns and cities of North America to some extent.⁴ In Southern California, the Spaniards who ventured north to Alta California in the late eighteenth century relied on Chumash, Serrano, Gabrielino, Cahuilla, Cupeño, San Luiseño, and Kumeyaay Indians to build and maintain the missions, pueblos, and presidios of the region. In places such as San Fernando, San Juan Capistrano, San Luis Rey, San Gabriel, San Diego, and Los Angeles, Native people served as masons, carpenters, plasterers, soap makers, tanners, shoemakers, blacksmiths, millers, bakers, cooks, spinners, shepherds, and vaqueros, among other occupations. During the remainder of the Spanish period (1769–1821) and through the Mexican period (1821–48), Native people from throughout the region came or were coerced to live in these population centers, often working for wages or forced into labor by indebtedness and legal codes that institutionalized Indian slavery. After the U.S. conquest of the American Southwest in 1848, much of the land that had been granted to Indians in California was claimed by new settlers, especially along the coast and in the immediate interior valleys. Some Indians stayed in the coastal regions and continued to farm, raise livestock, gather traditional food resources, and fill the region’s labor needs, while others retreated to the interior and intermingled with other bands.⁵ After decades of investigations, surveys, commissions, and debates, Congress passed the 1891 Act for the Relief of the Mission Indians, which paved the way for the establishment of reservations managed by the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA). These reservations existed throughout San Diego, Imperial, Riverside, and San Bernardino counties, along the periphery of the region’s population centers and east over the mountains and into the desert. Although most reservation boundaries incorporated the primary lands of individual bands as understood at the time, some bands relocated entirely to other territories, and others remained outside the reservation system. Still others refused to move onto nearby reservations and continued to reside on their settled lands.⁶ The OIA founded the Sherman Institute in 1902 as a federal boarding school for Indians. In 1920 the OIA also consolidated the jurisdictions of various Indian superintendents to create the Mission Indian Agency, with subagencies on the Pala, Morongo, and Torrez-Martinez reservations. Working out of offices in Riverside, the Mission Indian Agency administered all reservations in Southern California.⁷ After the establishment of these reservations and the rationalization of their bureaucratic structures, American Indians in Southern California continued to cross reservation boundaries with regularity to interact with cities and towns throughout the region.⁸

The process of Indian removal, combined with the establishment of reservations in Southern California and other parts of North America, can be understood as a latter stage in the colonization of the continent and the shift of control over enormous areas of land with vast natural resources. With these losses in political authority, insufferable hardships, and drastic population losses, however, Native people did not vanish quietly into the past, nor did they live out diminished lives confined to reservations, as so many popular and scholarly understandings of history would have one believe. Over the first few decades of the twentieth century, Indians often engaged the territories that had come under the influence of Euro-American settlers. These lands were not as Native people had left them, for settlers had rapidly transformed them into farmland, towns, and cities. Indians from surrounding regions and Native people from farther away played a role in this development. Some worked for wages and returned to reservation communities, while others settled in cities and towns to add to the social and cultural landscape.

The movement of Indians back to the growing cities and towns of North America is explained by the harshness of reservation life and the dispossession of Native land and resources. In Southern California, reservations existed on marginal lands isolated from population centers and subject to extremes of weather. Agriculture was often risky and the only economic prospect at hand. These conditions only worsened over time, due to long droughts and because non-Indian farmers and ranchers siphoned off local water supplies. The availability of traditional foods, historically gathered from nearby areas, also decreased in the face of rural and urban development. An almost total lack of developed roads, utilities, and other basic services created unsanitary and dangerous conditions and could make day-to-day life a struggle to maintain a decent standard of living or to even survive.⁹

A small sample of reports from Southern California reservations illustrates some of these difficulties. Between 1921 and 1922, several reservations sent local news and conditions to the Mission Indian Federation, an Indian-run advocacy group for Southern California Indians. The La Jolla Tribe noted that the drought of 1921 had caused the failure of the reservation’s 300 acres of crops and led many to look in the surrounding area for work.¹⁰ This drought was followed by one of the worst winters in many years. On the Cahuilla Reservation several cattle and horses were lost to fall and winter storms. The Morongo Reservation reported that “cold blizzards did great damage to our stock and fruit trees. Ten head of stock died for lack of pasture feed. . . . Our fruit buds were damaged by the freezing cold, and we face a shortage of fruit this season. The people will not be able to put any fruit in great quantities for winter’s use.”¹¹ The following spring, the secretary for the Soboba Tribe wrote that the lack of work at the reservation had made life dreary. Tribal members looked forward to the fruit season and travel to the Hemet Valley to pick in the orchards. At the same time, on the Campo Reservation, a “sickness” spread and caused the death of several reservation residents, while many more were taken ill.¹² Such illness and premature death were common. A tribal member from the Los Coyotes Reservation lamented that his sister had fifteen children and all had died in infancy.¹³ These types of conditions alarmed the San Diego branch of the Bureau of Catholic Charities, which began a collection of money, food, and clothes for Southern California reservations.¹⁴ It is not surprising that many Southern California Indians—and Native people in other parts of the country, who faced similar hardships—would search off the reservation in the hopes of obtaining better standards of living.

Many Indians first looked to nearby rural areas and towns, where they found seasonal jobs as migratory laborers. This work could provide Indian people with crucial sources of income and also presented possibilities for integrating wage labor into social, cultural, and economic strategies rooted in tribal lands and communities. Historian Eric Meeks has argued that the participation of Tohono O’odham Indians in the federal and corporate industrialization of southern Arizona was a case of “resistant adaptation,” because the Tohono O’odham engaged in cotton picking, mining, domestic service, and railroad work to complement their seasonal subsistence patterns. Historian Colleen O’Neill has shown how Navajos similarly absorbed wage labor on and near the reservation into a diverse, household-centered economy that included domestic production and sheepherding. Both authors have stressed how Native cultural and social values filtered their participation in the capitalist market, even as wage labor transformed Indian people and communities.¹⁵ Native experience resembled that of other rural Americans who confronted the integration of the lands and resources they depended on into larger markets and found new values attached to their labor. Early American historian Christopher Clark has examined the processes in rural New England that drew it into the industrial orbit of late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. It was a comparable process whereby rural residents gradually engaged in market capitalism grounded in the values of their local exchange economies.¹⁶

Cases abound of Indians participating in labor markets that grew rapidly in rural areas around Indian reservations throughout the United States and Canada. During the 1920s, in Needles, Calif., on the Arizona border, about 300 Mojave Indians from nearby Fort Mojave Reservation found jobs alongside European Americans, African Americans, and immigrants from Mexico and Japan, as casual laborers for the Santa Fe Railway. Mojave Indians also worked paving streets, building roads, and constructing houses, and on area farms. In Arizona, Apache Indians from the San Carlos Reservation spent part of the year in the nearby towns of Globe and Miami, employed in mining, road construction, railroad work, domestic service, and the production of Native crafts. Members of the Hualapai tribe similarly worked for wages in Kingman, Ariz., just outside the reservation’s western boundary.¹⁷ Throughout British Columbia and Alaska, Indians served as loggers, longshoremen, teamsters, cowboys, miners, fishermen, and cannery workers.¹⁸ In the Northern Plains and Upper Midwest regions, Indians worked both in the timber industry and on farms and ranches. Menominee Indians were employed in the forests and sawmills, while Ho-Chunk Indians picked strawberries, cranberries, cherries, corn, peas, and potatoes. Outside the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, the town of Rapid City maintained a population of approximately 3,000 migratory Sioux Indians who mostly worked cutting timber.¹⁹ In the 1920s, in northern Maine, Mi’kmaw, Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, and Maliseet Indians were recruited as migratory laborers on the region’s growing potato farms.²⁰ Indians filled labor needs on the farms and ranches of Northern California, both as field hands and domestic servants.²¹

Southern California emerged as another site of Indian migratory wage labor. As early as 1909, most “young people” at the Rincon, La Jolla, and Pechanga reservations spent all but a few weeks away from the reservation, because their jobs were either on area ranches or in cities.²² The superintendent of the Malki Agency in the desert town of Banning wrote in 1919: “Many of the Indians belonging in this jurisdiction do not live on the reservation, but in nearby towns and on ranches where they find ready employment at good wages. It is also true that the majority of those living on the reservations are employed in the towns or in the white ranchers’ orchards adjoining the reservations, going to their work early in the morning and returning late in the evening.” The superintendent lamented that “the demand for labor and high wages paid has taken many of our Indians” from the “gardens” and “home work” that were part of the government’s assimilation program.²³ Several more cases illustrate larger patterns of Indian migration and labor. Every autumn during the first decades of the twentieth century, Indians from San Diego County traveled to El Cajon, east of San Diego, to work in the grape fields.²⁴ In November 1921, several families from the Soboba Reservation worked in the walnut groves near the town of Walnut, while the men living at the Cahuilla Reservation were away picking oranges or building roads.²⁵ Early in 1922, Indians from Southern California could be found in the vicinity of Riverside, where the orange groves were expected to provide steady work for months.²⁶ A number of families from the Campo Reservation traveled to Brawley, to work in the cotton and corn fields and on small ranches. Two men from the Pala Reservation, meanwhile, spent the late winter traveling a circuit to shear sheep.²⁷ Indians from several reservations had migrated to Hemet by summer, in time for fruit season. Others were camped in the Palomar Mountains, north of San Diego, where there was great demand in the apricot orchards for pickers and pitters.²⁸ Work in the walnut and fruit groves and packinghouses continued well into the fall throughout the region.²⁹ After living in cities throughout the American West and settling in Los Angeles, Martina Costo, a Cahuilla Indian who was born in 1910, remembered ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• REIMAGINING INDIAN COUNTRY
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• ILLUSTRATIONS & TABLES
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 1 SETTLING INTO THE CITY
• CHAPTER 2 REPRESENTING INDIANS
• CHAPTER 3 FROM AMERICANIZATION TO SELF-DETERMINATION
• CHAPTER 4 POSTINDUSTRIAL URBAN INDIANS
• CHAPTER 5 BEING INDIAN IN THE CITY
• CHAPTER 6 GRASSROOTS INDIAN ACTIVISM
• CONCLUSION
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX