Examine The Topic Of Urban Indian Communities

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Urban Indian
The ever-growing number of Native Indians in the American urban centers has shifted the population residency from rural farms and reservations. Various policies and practices have a hand in the Indian relocation and settlements to the urban centers and the resulting impacts on the Indian society and family structure.
The federal government had a role in the mass relocation of the Indian people to urban areas. According to Mankiller and Michael, the BIA’s (Bureau of Indian Affairs) program initiated by the federal government in the 1950s planned for Indians’ relocation to California (98). The program was intended to create better jobs and housing facilities for them. Dr. Susan Lobo also associates the 1950s Federal Relocation program with the influx of the Indian people in urban areas (3). The voluntary relocation program was part of the government’s initiatives to create better jobs and solve the housing problem for the community that had previously been sidelined. The small number of Indians living in reservations led poor lives without any farmland following the nineteenth century treaties that were never ratified (ManKiller and Michael 100). These policies and programs have had significant influence on the Indian community.
Relocation and settlement programs exposed the Indian families to immense racial prejudice and ethnic intolerance. From brunt and direct racial slurs to indirect backbiting, the Indian minorities experienced cruel and unjust racial discrimination in the white majority California (ManKiller and Michael 99). The continued discrimination of the Natives resulted in a community battling “high unemployment, low education attainment, low esteem, and problems with alcohol abuse” (ManKiller and Michael 101). Despite better treatment of the India people after World War II, their social and economic predicament remained unchanged. Many families lived in poverty only affording the essentials. Majority of people lived in overpopulated multiracial settlements with cases o...