Institute for the Study of Societal Issues

Through a “three pronged” termination policy, including the termination of tribal sovereignty, cultures and lands, the U.S. federal government sought to finally end the trust relationship it held with Native Americans. While both the termination of Native Nations and Public Law 280 assaulted the sovereignty of Native Nations, it was the relocation program that would finally force Native individuals to be active participants in the capitalist system. By the time the relocation program was brought to Oakland, California, in 1956, the city was undergoing drastic demographic and population shifts, which would have a major impact on the opportunities available to the relocation program participants. Like the reservations, the flatland neighborhoods of Oakland were both economically and politically controlled from the outside, rendering them a virtual colony of the larger city. Thus, rather than advance their economic or political status, as the actions of the Relocation Office would suggest, this new colonial system, operating within the internal colony of the “Black ghetto,” would perpetuate the low economic position of Native peoples. Tracing the history of American relocation into Oakland, this paper examines and exposes the central role of vocational training in the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) educational system, which not only enabled the largest relocation of Native peoples into urban areas, but forced Native students into urban school systems that simultaneously maintained and transformed colonial narratives, policies and rhetoric of the earlier BIA educational models while also inadvertently creating spaces that facilitated the most organized forms of intertribal resistance and activism. Tracing the history of relocation into the flatlands of Oakland is of particular interest as it highlights how the processes and understandings of sovereignty, internal colonialism, and positionality intersect within and between racially colonized communities. Consequently, by reconstructing the story of relocation into Oakland, we can begin to question what impact this had on the relocatees’ colonial status as “wards of the state,” in addition to asking how, as well as whether, relocation transformed the ways in which Native peoples were viewed externally (from various levels of government along with local non-Native neighbors and community members) and how this shifted, if at all, internal perceptions of self and community. Thus, using the history of relocation and urban Indians as a guide, we can begin to unpack the ways in which their colonial relationship has changed over time and space.