American Indian Culture and Research Journal

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, Liebow on Phoenix, Shoemaker on Minneapolis, Bramstedt and Weibel-Orlando on Los Angeles, Danziger on Detroit, and Guillemin on Boston indicates parallels and counterpoints to the regional focus of this article. The next step beyond this current article is delineating the specific ways in which urban communities in different parts of the United States are unique and how they came to develop, as well as taking a comparative approach to understanding the extent and nature of parallels that do exist among widely distant urban Indian communities. It should be noted, however, that an in-depth comparative study of various urban communities is long, long overdue.