American Indian Culture and Research Journal

The majority of us [city-raised Indian people] walk around with this hole in our heart. We know we’re different, that there’s a piece of our life that is missing. —Michelle Duncan Since the middle of the twentieth century, when large numbers of American Indian people began migrating from reservations to cities in search of work and a better life, a great deal has been published on the “urban Indian” phenomenon. While a few ethnographic or ethnohistorical works have appeared recently that seek to describe entire urban Indian communities in all their complexity, the great majority of urban Indian studies to date focus on some aspect of the circumstances, problems, and adjustment strategies of those who grew up on reservations and then moved to a city, or those who move back and forth between the two sites. This emphasis, while valuable, neglects an increasingly important segment of urban Indian communities—those whose parents grew up on reservations but who themselves have grown up in the city. In the present article, I focus on this second generation of urban Indian people in an analysis that relies heavily on life-historical interview material. Before turning to a description of the ethnographic setting and then to the narratives themselves, a few words on my theoretical and methodological perspective are in order.