Full Throughline. Prev Previous Bandung Conference, The Indian Relocation Act of Joel Garcia. Absalom Jones. Indian Removal Act, Mexican-American War, The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Chinese Exclusion Act in the United States, The Dawes Act of The Mexican Repatriation, AIM members got the most media attention for their protests and armed occupations, but they also ran programs that directly served Native people.
AIM started a health clinic in Minneapolis, the first of its kind in the country. They managed the first and only American Indian-preference Section 8 housing project in the country.
It's called Little Earth and includes more than units on nearly 10 acres in Minneapolis. AIM even had lawyers on staff to help Native families caught up in the legal system. They went to court with Dorene's mom when she asked them to — Dorene's older siblings were getting into fights at school, or, more often, just not going.
That meant that their parents were drinking. That meant all of the things that were like, you know, the stereotypical ways of thinking about who we are as Indigenous people. At this time, as many as a third of Native kids were being put in foster care, mostly with non-Native families. Because their mom worked so much, Dorene's siblings could pretend they were going to school and then turn around and go right back home. But Charlotte also didn't want to put them back into public school, so she walked back into the AIM office in St.
Paul to talk to one of its leaders, Eddie Benton-Banai. Well, I need you to do that today,'" Dorene remembers. They named it the Red School House.
They were among the first Indigenous-controlled schools in the country. The first classes were held in a church basement. Then they moved to a community center. Charlotte collected food stamps from all the families and prepared lunch for the students. Eventually, they got a two-story brick building in a working-class neighborhood of St.
It served students in kindergarten through 12th grade until it ran into financial troubles in the s and closed. Dorene says the school was transformative. Anything like that was so empowering. And not only was it empowering, it was like this special, special feeling," Dorene said. She grew up on the Red Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota and relocated three times. She eventually wound up in St. Paul and worked as a grant writer for the Red School House.
Drum every afternoon. Kids hugged each other. It was really an ideal place. King and Dorene Day both remember the day Social Services came to take a child into foster care. Not while we're here,'" Dorene said. Everyone locked arms and wouldn't let them in. Native activism had an effect, and throughout the s, oppressive federal policies began to unravel. In , Menominee activist Ada Deer led a group that successfully pushed for Congress to restore their tribal sovereignty.
Other tribes soon did the same, though not all terminated tribes were restored. It explicitly stated that tribes have the right to manage their own affairs, including running their own schools.
In , Congress passed the Indian Child Welfare Act, meant to prevent Native children from being taken from their parents and given to non-Native families. While relocation and termination ended, the damage remains: Native Americans still endure disproportionally high rates of unemployment, homelessness, violence, mental illness and addiction. When Dorene was 16, her father was found dead in a pond in northern Minnesota.
He'd never moved to St. Paul and never really quit drinking, either. But he would visit once a month bringing fresh rabbit and deer meat and sometimes some extra money. Sharon was 23 when it happened. She's the one who drove her mom up to Virginia, Minnesota, to collect his remains. When they got to his house, they saw blood and a smashed bottle. She says the police hadn't been there.
You've never arrested anybody for killing an Indian. When the autopsy came back, they didn't find any water in his lungs. The cause of death was a brain hemorrhage, likely from a fight. The crime has never been solved. More than four out of five Native Americans have been victims of violence, according to a survey.
Native women are particularly vulnerable, which has given rise to the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women's movement. Most of the violence is perpetrated by people of other races. The night after Sharon's family buried their father, she relapsed and started drinking again. I had all of them, right? She had already gone to treatment for alcoholism and had been sober for two years when her father died. She drank for six months after her relapse and then got sober again. She's been in recovery ever since.
Shortly after that, Sharon and Dorene drove deep into the woods in Wisconsin — "somewhere in the bush" — to go into a Midewiwin lodge, where the traditional religion is practiced by the Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi.
They hadn't been in a Midewiwin ceremony before, but Sharon said it was so familiar. Because that's what my dad would do with us under the pine tree," Sharon said. That's what we did in the lodge. Dorene stayed on that spiritual path.
Today, she's a fourth-degree Midewiwin , which is like having a theology degree; it means she lives according to a set of Midewiwin principles and values. She's also a midwife. She visits tribal communities across the upper Midwest and parts of Canada to teach the ceremonies and traditions that even when she was a teenager were against the law Congress passed the Indian Religious Freedom Act in , which states Native people have the right to practice their own Indigenous religions.
Dorene says it's this spiritual path that will help Indigenous people heal. I had an entire community that revolved around my well-being in order for me to become a person that now will look toward the well-being of my community. A growing body of research on what's called historical trauma shows how traumatic events can affect later generations.
One longitudinal study of more than a thousand Native people living on or near reservations found higher rates of depression, substance use, and delinquent behaviors like stealing among the children and grandchildren of those who were relocated. Other studies have shown how Indian boarding schools and foster care also inflicted trauma that affected later generations.
We have the medicines. We have the tools. Those are our gifts. Those are the things that our ancestors died for, that we need to pick up and bring back into the breath of the community. And it's happening. It's happening all over Indian Country. Early in the summer of , a handful of tents appeared on a strip of grass in between an eight-lane highway and a concrete barrier in Minneapolis. It's not the type of place you would notice, unless you saw a bunch of tents there.
It's an urban no-man's land, which for half the year is covered in snow and debris pushed off the highway. In the following weeks, more and more people moved in and set up their own tents. There were people with toddlers and babies. Working people. People deep in their addictions to alcohol and opioids. By August, the recently sworn-in mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, visited the encampment with his even more recently appointed police chief, Medaria Arradondo.
Unlike in other cities that have cleared out homeless encampments, they decided no one would have to move and no one would be arrested. Instead, they handed out food and water. They set up portable street lights and police cameras for safety. And then, the encampment really took off, swelling to the largest anyone can remember in Minnesota. A tipi went up, and then another one.
You could see them from the highway, smoke rising from the tops. Eventually, there were more than tents, pitched cheek-by-jowl, right next to a highway called "Hiawatha Avenue.
Most everyone living in the encampment was Native American, which inspired its name: the Wall of Forgotten Natives. The city had set a goal of getting everyone off the street by the end of September. But the end of September came and went. There were just too many people and not enough housing or shelter beds. Instead, the encampment continued to grow. There was a constant stream of donated clothes and camping supplies. Hot meals were served every day, sometimes cooked over a large fire as cars whizzed by.
Outreach workers brought around clean needles and the drug Narcan, which can reverse an opioid overdose. Dealers went tent by tent, too. People also came for community. I love that all the Natives, all the homeless Natives, come together as one," she told me.
When the tribes were a big tribe. And we're living outside. And we're surviving. The encampment forced city and state officials to confront two facts that had been reported in research papers year after year: Native Americans are among the most likely to be homeless, and they've been particularly hard hit by the opioid epidemic.
Native-led nonprofits reached into their operating budgets to help. They set up portable showers, a warming tent and a phone-charging station. They provided food and camping gear. They sent in social workers to sign people up for drug and alcohol treatment. But it wasn't enough. And, as Minnesota winter approached, everyone knew it wasn't a safe place for people to stay. The city decided to build a new, temporary shelter. But they didn't have anywhere to put it, until the Red Lake Nation stepped forward.
The Ojibwe tribe, with a reservation in northern Minnesota, offered the city land it owns, not on the reservation, but just on the other side of the highway from the encampment. Red Lake also provided health care inside the encampment and used its tribal authority to sign people up for a state housing subsidy.
Freezing temperatures and snow arrived in Minneapolis before the city could open the shelter. People covered their nylon tents with several tarps and huddled around campfires right there on the sidewalk next to the highway.
One day, after the shelter opened, I drove north five hours from the Twin Cities to the Red Lake reservation to see tribal secretary Sam Strong to find out why the tribe was so involved in the encampment. Strong is 36 years old. He wears his hair in a long braid down his back. Strong didn't grow up on the reservation.
His dad went on relocation to Los Angeles in the s, and then moved to Minneapolis where Strong was born. Shortly after, they moved to North Carolina, where Strong grew up. As a little kid you always look for it. You know, I always thought, 'Hey, that's where I'm from,'" Strong says. His path back to the reservation started when he was 16 and entered treatment for drug and alcohol addiction in North Carolina.
It was a culturally specific facility run by the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. And an elder there said he should go to Minnesota and work for his own tribe. I want you to go back to your people, and plan out your community in a way that is respectful of our traditions. And I know you can do it because I see that you have respect for our people and our way of life, but you also understand how to work in today's world and you can combine those two.
Racial, housing, and job discrimination and segregation contribute to poverty and homelessness coupled with cultural and social isolation. The Act plays a significant role in increasing the population of urban Indians in succeeding decades Weeks, From to , more than , Indians of all tribes move to cities.
Click here to view instructions. Note: At the same time the federal government was terminating its responsibilities to tribes, Congress included Indian reservations in federal education programs created by Congress , in the school construction programs PL and impact aid programs PL , resulting in increased federal involvement in Indian education by Deloria and Lytle,, p The Transfer Act transferred all functions and duties of the Department of the Interior concerned with the maintenance and operation of hospital and health facilities for Indians to the Department of Health, Education and Welfare now the Department of Health and Human Services.
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