Struggles for the land and the city: Settler colonialism,anticolonialism,and the Bureau of Indian Affairs Urban Relocation Program in Chicago

Introduction

“We’ve lost so much and gained so little,” said Betty Chosa Jack (Ojibwe), as she flipped through family photographs and recollected how her father, who raised her and her siblings on the Lac De Flambeau Reservation in Wisconsin, had advised them to assimilate into white society as a matter of survival (Aronson, 1978). Chosa Jack would find that assimilation—either as an individual survival tactic or official Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) policy—only furthered alienation and dispossession. Aronson’s (1978) documentary, A Divided Trail: A Native American Odyssey, traces the personal and political narratives of Chosa Jack and two other Native activists, Mike Chosa and Carol Warrington, who would become leaders of the Chicago Indian Village movement in the early 1970s. Describing the longer history of the Ojibwe being confined to reservations as the United States stole their lands while their practices of hunting and spear-fishing—central to their survival and social reproduction—were degraded and attacked, Chosa Jack described the BIA Urban Relocation policies as a more recent iteration of the federal government’s tactics of dispossession:

When I was younger the government agency on the reservation had brochures telling us how good life is in the city. This was part of the relocation plan to get us off the reservation. Everybody that left usually ended up in the slums or the ghettos (as quoted in Aronson, 1978).

Chosa Jack, like thousands of other Native people relocated to Chicago, would find herself confined to temporary day work and dilapidated housing conditions. These were the impacts of the BIA’s Urban Relocation program, which focused on encouraging Native American migration from reservations to cities to promote economic and social progress:

You know, the Bureau of Indian Affairs had really encouraged us to come to this city and then they just abandoned us. In the ghetto nothing ever really worked: plumbing, the heat—everything was always broken down. I hated living here. Conditions were terrible. Unlivable. We were buried alive. We had to do something (as quoted in Aronson, 1978).

In response to these dire conditions, Chosa Jack organized with Native people of other nations relocated to Chicago to help found the Chicago Indian Village (BIA) movement, which would challenge the neglect and marginalization from both the BIA and the city of Chicago.

This paper examines the settler colonial dynamics of the BIA’s Urban Relocation program in Chicago. Analyzing these dynamics, I ask: How did the BIA imagine and represent Chicago through the relocation program? What images or representations did the BIA rely on to construct their set of criteria of what constituted a successful Relocation program, and how did this shape their management of the program? And, how did relocated Native people experience, negotiate, or challenge the BIA’s desires for the program?

Existing sociological and urban historical research on postwar U.S. urban inequality is not well-positioned to answer these questions. Research in this area has foregrounded how racism and the construction of white subjectivities are central to the production of racial segregation and exploitation in the city, but it most often does not include an analysis or discussion of colonialism and Indigenous experiences in the city (e.g., Gotham, 2014; Hirsch, 1983; Hyra, 2017; Mele, 2017; Rothstein, 2017; Sugrue, 2014). When scholarship in this area does, in rare cases, bring in colonialism, such as in the case in Smith’s (1996) focus on frontier discourses, it is most often for historical reference or for metaphor or comparison to describe racial and class inequality (Jackson, 2017; Kent-Stoll, 2020; Mays, 2023). Moreover, while segregation remains a dominant frame of reference for studying urban inequality (e.g., Hyra, 2017; Rothstein, 2017), an analysis of the racial and colonial logics of assimilation is also needed to understand relocation. However, sociological literature on assimilation has historically not grappled with the racial and colonial logics of assimilation, instead assuming assimilation as a normative aspiration or metric of equality (see Jung, 2009; also see Itzigsohn, 2023). As Jung (2015: 91–107) argues, even in more contemporary efforts within research on assimilation to move away from ethnocentrism (e.g., Alba and Nee, 2005; Zhou and Xiong, 2005), the racial and colonial forms of domination required to construct a putative mainstream and non-mainstream are minimized.

Thus, answering this study’s questions regarding the colonial and assimilatory logics of the relocation program requires foregrounding the settler colonial logics of the U.S. state, how these logics shaped regimes of Indigenous dispossession in the city, and Indigenous responses, articulations, and resistance against these logics. These dynamics can be understood by bringing into urban and historical sociology’s purview perspectives from the vantage point of the colonized that identify and explain the enduring significance of the settler colonial structure in U.S. cities. Foregrounding this vantage point contributes to this special issue on Indigeneity, History, and Historical Analysis by examining how the long, enduring structure of settler colonialism and resistance against it has shaped political subjectivities and place-making in the modern city, a geography too often assumed as separate from both indigeneity and colonialism. As Go (2016) describes in his call for a postcolonial sociology, foregrounding the perspectives and experiences of the colonized and postcolonial thinkers from the Global South helps offer “new insights on the social world that would otherwise go repressed, excluded, or marginalized” (p. 173) and thus, offer greater insights regarding the workings of colonial power and institutions. In a similar vein, an analysis of U.S. urban history that is informed by the standpoint of Indigenous history brings into the foreground the settler colonial dimensions of urban inequality and the decolonial aspects of struggles against urban marginality and dispossession that too often have been overlooked or remained minimal to urban sociology and historical accounts of urban inequality. Urban histories of Indigenous dispossession and resistance prompt urban sociology to reassess what structures, peoples, and histories it takes for granted as included within the landscape of urban politics and history, and thus how settler colonial histories, policies, and ideologies continue to shape urban inequalities and political struggles. Toward that end, and following the special issue’s focus on examining resistance in the context of settler colonialism, this paper juxtaposes the BIA’s narratives of relocation with those stemming from Indigenous experiences with and critiques of relocation to analyze how struggles over who has the authority and power to shape the city and claim the land defined the settler colonial dimensions of Urban Relocation and resistance against it.

This paper proceeds as follows. First, I review urban sociological and urban historical approaches to racial politics and inequality before introducing settler colonial urbanism and urban indigeneity as frameworks to help explain the dynamics of the relocation program. Following this, I provide a brief overview of the historical role of the Bureau of Indian Affairs within the U.S. state before discussing my data and methods. In the findings, I focus on the settler colonial logics of relocation and how the Chicago Indian Village responded to them. The BIA imagined Chicago as a modern city disconnected from the Indigenous past and present to erase Indigenous relationalities through relocation. The BIA also relied on an anti-Black discourse of “blight” in their expectations for successfully relocated families to integrate into more desirable—that is, less Black and working-class—areas. In response to the BIA’s desires and expectations, relocated Indigenous people drew on anticolonial space-making and political critiques to maintain and rework Indigenous relationalities while unmasking the settler colonial logics of Urban Relocation. I conclude by discussing the findings’ implications, focusing on how historical sociological and urban sociological scholarship can better understand how dispossession shapes the racialized and colonial forms of urban inequality that Indigenous people face.

Racial politics and the urban production of urban space

Urban sociological and urban historical research on racial politics and urban redevelopment has focused on how political and business elites aim to racialize space and shape redevelopment for their own interests (e.g., Cazenave, 2011; Gotham, 2014; Hirsch, 1983; Massey and Denton, 1993; Mele, 2017; Sugrue, 2014). This literature has revealed the political machinations of political and business elites in reproducing and maintaining racial segregation and domination through legal tactics, exploitative real estate maneuvers, urban renewal, and gentrification projects on the one hand (Gotham, 2014; Hyra, 2017; Mele, 2017) and the underdevelopment of public and affordable housing on the other (e.g., Arena, 2012; Smith, 2012), as well as tactics of everyday violence and terror by white residents to maintain the color line (e.g., Hirsch, 1983; Lipsitz, 2011).

While this literature is crucial in identifying the key institutional dynamics within the state that produce racialized urban inclusion and exclusion, colonial dispossession is not considered as a key category of analysis. For example, Massey and Denton’s (1993) and Hirsch’s (1983) classic studies on residential segregation uncover the structural and institutional causes of racial residential segregation and racialized poverty that disproportionately impact Black populations, including restrictive covenants, undermining the enforcement of anti-discrimination laws, racist real estate and banking practices, and violence and intimidation among white neighborhood organizations. Other more recent studies have focused on similar institutional actors and dynamics as central to maintaining the color line in U.S. cities (e.g., Gotham, 2014; Mele, 2017; Rothstein, 2017). Building on this careful documentation of the structural persistence or residential segregation, ethnographic and theoretical works have focused on how everyday forms of white racism and racist preferences and attitudes enacted on the microlevel have stalled racial integration and inequality by maintaining segregated social spaces (Hyra, 2017; Montalva Barba, 2024), as well as by promoting forced assimilation upon people of color to adhere to white middle class aesthetics even in nominally integrated neighborhoods (Walton, 2021). Notably, Montalva Barba’s (2024) ethnography of white residents of the gentrifying Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston focuses on how white claims to space draw upon settler colonial myths and discourses. Nonetheless, more empirical research can focus specifically on how Indigenous populations have experienced and navigated white settler colonial claims to space and land.

Within the dominant urban studies trend of focusing on the dynamics of racial inclusion and exclusion—either through a rubric of segregation or assimilation—Indigenous peoples’ encounters with urban space and urban policy are most often marginalized or absent (Kent-Stoll, 2020; Mays, 2023). Tracking exclusionary tactics and the politics of racial domination is crucial to understanding why racialized urban poverty and segregation endure. However, understanding ongoing histories of colonial dispossession in urban space, not least by focusing on key governmental agencies whose practices directly affect Indigenous populations such as the Bureau of Indian Affairs, will add greater depth to an analysis of those exclusionary tactics while providing an analysis of how Indigenous people are specifically dispossessed and excluded from and within urban spaces.

Why is this account missing from these studies of urban racial politics? First, as Mays (2023) argues, urban studies research on racist urban policies and residential segregation has tended to either marginalize accounts of Indigenous experiences in urban space or to use Indigenous experiences with colonialism metaphorically to describe other populations’ marginality. For example, Massey and Denton (1993) refer to segregated and underdeveloped Black neighborhoods as “black reservations” (p. 57), in an oblique reference to the forms of isolation and material deprivation faced by American Indians in U.S.-constructed reservations. But the actual experiences and conditions of Indigenous populations do not figure into their analysis of the development of forms of segregation and racism in U.S. cities. Second, I contend that this is a result of the literature largely taking an approach to racial politics that takes various degrees of inclusion or exclusion within the nation state as a primary framework for understanding enduring inequalities (e.g., Hirsch, 1983; Massey and Denton, 1993; Rothstein, 2017). This approach—as Jung and Kwon (2013, 2020) point out—obscures the position of Indigenous peoples and colonized subjects within and in relation to the state. Shifting the frame to focus on the empire-state—which Jung and Kwon (2013, 2020) classify the U.S. state as—allows for an understanding of how historical regimes of colonial dispossession continue to shape urban inequalities in the 20th and 21st centuries. That is, contrary to imagining the U.S. as a nation-state, which would entail assuming a stable and “politically uniform” territory (Jung and Kwon, 2013: 934), an understanding of the U.S. as an empire state emphasizes how the putative territory of the state, including both rural and urban spaces, is comprised of a patchwork of different forms of racial and colonial governance applied unequally across different populations. Thus, while urban spaces can often be imagined within settler colonial states as devoid of indigeneity (Moreton-Robinson, 2015) and thus not governed by the logics of colonialism, moving away from assuming political uniformity requires tracking the specific forms of governance and domination that have specifically targeted Indigenous peoples in both rural and urban spaces within the empire state. To understand how colonial dispossession specifically shapes how Indigenous peoples encounter urban space, I draw on literature from settler colonial studies and Indigenous studies that theorize on settler colonial states and cities to name and explain the specific policies and dynamics that dispossess Indigenous populations in urban spaces.

Settler colonial urbanisms and urban indigeneities

The vantage point of settler colonial urbanisms foregrounds how anti-Indigenous violence and Indigenous dispossession are foundational to the past and present of cities within settler colonial states. Research in this area analyzes how white and non-Native urban subjectivities and representations are constructed in relation to discourses of Indigenous erasure and colonial settlement (e.g., Addie and Fraser, 2019; Barraclough, 2018; Grandinetti, 2018; Montalva Barba, 2024) and how urban political economies and political formations depend upon the continued seizure and occupation of Indigenous lands (e.g., Blatman-Thomas and Porter, 2019; Clarno, 2017; Estes, 2019; Launius and Boyce, 2021). While this framework is essential to foregrounding how histories of colonialism have shaped the production of urban space, both past and present, bringing this framework into dialogue with research on Indigenous articulations of and resistance within city spaces is key in moving away from any assumptions of settler colonial logics and policies as a fait accompli (see O’Brien, 2017; also see King, 2019).

A focus on urban indigeneity challenges settler colonial discourses that assume Native people as not belonging within modern city spaces. Additionally, this area of work engages with how Native people have historically, spatially, politically, and culturally negotiated, contented with, and built community within and across city spaces (Goeman, 2013; Low, 2016; Mays, 2022; Miller, 2019; Ramirez, 2007; Thrush, 2009; Tomiak, 2017). Importantly, this approach foregrounds how histories of land theft have shaped the production of city spaces and how Indigenous struggles for the land challenge these regimes of dispossession. As Coulthard (2014) explains, a vantage point of Indigenous struggles for the land against dispossession is key to grappling with the dynamics of settler states, as dispossession is the fundamental political economic category to describe and explain Indigenous people’s political and material conditions within settler colonialism. Mays (2023) provides a critique of urban studies scholarship for reproducing tropes of Indigenous erasure (e.g., Hamilton and Carmichael, 1967; Smith, 1996) and of historical scholarship on relocation for reproducing tropes of Indigenous loss and alienation in the modern city, as well as for not examining the connections between Black and Indigenous urban experiences (e.g., Fixico, 1986, 2000; Rosenthal, 2012). Building on these critiques, I analyze the relocation program by identifying and explaining the BIA’s settler colonial desires for the program—including how those desires were shaped by the anti-Black racial geography of Chicago—alongside Indigenous critiques of and resistance to the program and its impacts.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs and the logics of relocation

The Bureau of Indian Affairs, a federal agency of the U.S. government, was formed in 1824 as the Office of Indian Affairs within the War Department (Fixico, 2012: 16). It moved from the War Department to the Department of the Interior in 1849 and has been situated there since then (Fixico, 2012, 16). Its stated function has historically been the foremost agency responsible for defending treaty rights, administering policing, and delivering services—such as education, healthcare, and economic development—to Native Americans and their tribal governments (Deloria, 1969). Many of the services provided and administered are guaranteed and stipulated in treaties signed between Indigenous nations and the U.S. government (Deloria, 1969). Historically, then, the BIA has been a key point of focus for debates over what posture the U.S. should take toward Native Americans, and as a result, how the BIA should be organized in a way that best reflects this posture (Deloria, 1969; Fixico, 1986). For example, in the wake of World War II, as support for termination policy gained steam within the federal government (Fixico, 1986), the typical rationale for congressional support for this policy was the need to focus on “freeing” Native people from the restrictions of the BIA and its services. The most ardent congressional advocates of termination insisted on dissolving the BIA and hence absolving the federal government of its responsibilities laid out in treaties (Kent-Stoll, 2024). Relocation policies were linked to advocacy for termination during this period, as congressional and BIA advocates framed relocating Native people to cities as the next step toward progress after their land bases were dissolved (Deloria, 1969; Kent-Stoll, 2024).

BIA Urban Relocation policy began in the postwar era, first with temporary relocation and job placements to assist Navajo and Hopi populations severely impacted by blizzards (Fixico, 1986). These efforts soon expanded into a permanent relocation program and extended to federally recognized tribes beyond the Navajo and Hopi (Fixico, 1986; Miller, 2019). Once the Voluntary Relocation Program began on January 1, 1952, relocation centers, where the BIA would set up field offices and Native people would be placed in housing and jobs, were established in Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver, Joliet, IL, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Oakland, CA, Oklahoma City, Portland, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, San Jose, St. Louis, and Waukegan, IL (Rosenthal, 2012). Additionally, in 1957, Adult Vocational Training began with a focus on vocational training in preparation for job placements in cities (Miller, 2019).

Despite the BIA’s promotion of relocation as a policy of economic uplift, many job placements were for low-wage work, and housing placements were substandard (Fixico, 1986; Rosenthal, 2012). Support funding was also limited: the BIA typically provided initial transportation costs and a few weeks of financial support for Native families, with the expectation that families would provide for themselves thereafter and not return to reservations (Miller, 2019).

Approximately 155,000 Native people participated in relocation programs, including 55,000 in the Adult Vocational program (Miller, 2019). Chicago, a settler city located within the territories of the Three Fires People—the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Bodewadmi (Potawatomi)— saw the second most Indigenous people participate in relocation after Los Angeles. 4933 Indigenous people went on relocation to Chicago between 1952 and 1959 (LaGrand, 2002: 78). Most participants in Chicago relocation traveled from the Upper Midwest and Great Plains, as most participants were Ojibwe (33%) and Oceti Sakowin (19%). Other relocatees were Cherokee (6%), Navajo (5%), Choctaw (5%), Winnebago (4%), from “Three Affiliated Tribes” (3%), and “Others” (26%) (LaGrand, 2002, 78) the last two indicating the incomplete statistics collected by the BIA.

Termination policy was integrally linked to relocation. Termination was comprised of a series of efforts from the federal government to strip Native Nations of their federally recognized status while coercing them to relinquish more of their reservation lands (Fixico, 1986; Miller, 2019). Discursively justified as a cost-saving measure that would also promote Indigenous independence and economic revitalization, the actual reduction in federal expenditures was often negligible and, in some cases, costs increased in efforts to “prepare” nations for termination (Deloria, 1969). Terminated tribes were often cut off from essential services, and those who were not were forced to dedicate most of their political efforts to defending against the threat of Termination (Deloria, 1969). Thus, while better job opportunities in major cities may have been a pull factor for relocation, the acceleration of the federal government’s attacks on reservation lands was a push factor. Termination also provided an ideological justification for relocation policies, as the BIA and Congress portrayed major cities as a progressive step toward modernity for Native people held back by the economic and political backwardness reservations (Kent-Stoll, 2024).

Data and method

The racial and colonial imaginary of assimilation

Painting a depiction of modern, developed cities in contrast to undeveloped reservations was central to how the BIA imagined and sought to justify relocation (Kent-Stoll, 2024; Miller, 2019). As one of the major cities of the relocation program, Chicago was represented by the BIA as a modern city that could aid in the civilization and uplift of Native people. Foundational to this representation was the BIA’s deployment of dominant discourses of the racial and class geography of the city, as relocated Native people were envisioned as being absorbed by more “desirable” neighborhoods. This notion of neighborhood desirability relied on well-treaded descriptions of neighborhoods that identified or assumed majority-Black occupied spaces as blighted, dangerous, and less desirable (Fullilove, 2004; Muhammad, 2021). These descriptions had become hegemonic among politicians, social workers, and social scientists since the first Great Migration of African Americans from Southern to Northern cities in the early 20th century (Muhammad, 2021). In their vision of relocation, the BIA both drew upon these anti-Black imaginaries while also relying upon a settler colonial logic of Indigenous civilizing through assimilation.

Relocated families and individuals were moved into neighborhoods on the South, West, and North sides of the city in what the BIA saw as more or less clearly defined areas. With that said, BIA officials at the Chicago Field Office claimed that in most cases, they moved families into neighborhoods that were not “blighted.” Officials also claimed that they did not concentrate families into racially or ethnically homogenous areas:

We are occasionally asked if we are forced to house relocatees composed of one ethnic group only. This definitely has not been necessary. By and large, we have found it desirable to find apartments scattered about town rather than to cluster individuals and families in a few buildings. This facilitates a normal integration into the neighborhood (BIA Chicago Field Office, 1952a).

At the same time, BIA Field Office officials noted that in some instances, families would end up in less desirable or blighted areas either due to them choosing housing without being aware of the neighborhood, or the BIA wanting to keep an individual marked as misbehaving away from other relocated Native families:

Of more than 400 housing placements made to date only in rare instances have we had to relocate a family to a substandard and blighted area, and in such cases, it has only been necessary where the relocatee has made an exceedingly poor adjustment and was hurting other Indians by his conduct in a good neighborhood (BIA Chicago Field Office, 1952a).

In the BIA’s racial and colonial imaginary of the city and the relocation program, Native families were successful cases when they could adequately “integrate” into more desirable—that is, more middle class and whiter—areas while unsuccessful or troublesome cases might descend into a “less desirable,” “substandard,” or “blighted area”—that is, more working class and Black—both as punishment and to prevent harming other Native people who were more successfully assimilating. As LaGrand (2002) documents, some Native people on relocation echoed an anxiety toward Black neighborhoods. For example, a relocated Choctaw man raised concerns with the BIA Chicago Field Office, claiming that the bureau had placed him in a Black neighborhood. In response, a bureau employee claimed that it was not the BIA’s policy to place Native people in any neighborhood “that is predominately Negro, Latin, or Oriental. . .Every attempt has been made to house people to their own satisfaction” (LaGrand, 2002: 120), implying that a desired placement, if not among other Native people, was in a majority white neighborhood.

King (2019) uncovers how the geographies of colonial conquest rely not only on the logics of Indigenous erasure but also on the containment of Black movement. The BIA’s expectations for relocation reflect these anxieties and desires. The code words of “desirable,” “substandard,” and “blighted” indicate that BIA officials were well-versed in the racialized and classed discursive geographies of the city. These geographies were undergirded by an anti-Black logics of disposability and containment that targeted Black and working class residents for the city’s postwar slum clearance and urban renewal programs on the one hand while seeking to prevent Black people transgressing the rigid racial divisions of the city by moving into new areas on the other hand (Hirsch, 1983; Smith, 2012). In the BIA’s vision of assimilation through relocation, Native people could modernize by assimilating into, or at least being accepted into, white areas and would be failed cases if they descended into Black areas. This logic reveals how the BIA operated within both the segregated landscape buttressed by anti-Black discourses in Chicago, as well as a settler colonial imaginary of the city that erased prior Indigenous presence to construct a narrative of Indigenous assimilation into the modern city.

Reflecting their goals to manage a relocation program of Native people integrating into a modern Chicago, the BIA Field Office coordinated the formation of recreational and social gatherings to foster goodwill among Native people, the BIA, and non-Native Chicagoans. The first iteration of this formation was the American Indian Club, started in 1952, whose membership was comprised of Native people who had come to Chicago through relocation and long-time Native residents of Chicago. With Native people coordinating plans in communication with the BIA Field Office officials, the BIA boasted about the success of the Club’s first major event, a Halloween powwow, which attracted non-Native spectators:

All of this quite new to Chicago. On the night of the party, crowds gathered about the entrance hall in friendly curiosity. Youngsters climbed window bars to get a glimpse of ‘real American Indians (BIA Chicago Field Office, 1952b).

The BIA’s description of this spectacle ignored the history of Indigenous peoples in the Chicago region, including the Potawatomi, Ojibwe, Odawa, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Meskwaki, and Miami, as well as those such as the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians who continued to reside in the larger Great Lakes region, maintain presence in Chicago, and persist in their claims to ancestral lands throughout the 20th century in Chicago even after forced removals from the city by the federal government in the 19th century (Low, 2016: xi–xii, 29–30). Obscuring the past and present indigeneity of the city, the BIA described Native presence as “quite new to Chicago” and suggested that Native people might be accepted into the city’s social fabric through being rendered as exotic curiosities. The BIA described what they saw as the benefits of the American Indian Club as follows:

Promotion of leisure time activities has developed an unmistakable atmosphere of good will toward the Chicago Field Office. The attitude of belligerence, and mistrust we occasionally noticed during the first weeks of our existence is rapidly disappearing. (BIA Chicago Field Office, 1952b)

Eventually, the American Indian Club would be transformed into the All-Tribes American Indian Center (and later renamed the American Indian Center) in 1953—still in existence today— with a headquarters at the corner of LaSalle and Kinzie Streets on the near North Side, focused on arranging social gatherings, building community, and coordinating social services (LaGrand, 2002: 138–139). The Center would emerge as a hub through which Native people increasingly articulated critiques against the BIA’s termination and relocation policies. In response, the BIA Chicago Field Office’s director, Kurt Dreifuss, launched a campaign to undermine the Center. Dreifuss began refusing to share the names of newly relocated families with the Center and helped form an alternative center, the Kenmore Uptown Center in the North Side’s Uptown neighborhood, with leadership selected by the BIA (LaGrand, 2002: 143).

Dreifuss and the Field Office did not achieve their goals of leveraging the first center as a strategy to promote “goodwill.” The American Indian Center (AIC) in Chicago was the first urban center for and led primarily by Indigenous people. Many more similar centers would form in other cities throughout the U.S. and would play a key role in building community and kinship, coordinating essential services and needs, and articulating pan-Indigenous identities amid the alienating politics of relocation and termination (LaGrand, 2002; Rosenthal, 2012). This is not to say that the politics of these centers always took a confrontational approach to BIA policies. Rather, throughout the life of the relocation program in Chicago, AIC served as a contested space through which varying and sometimes competing political visions and approaches manifested (LaGrand, 2002). For the BIA’s part, in addition to seeking to circumscribe the political articulations of relocated Native people, the agency also aimed to facilitate the production of pliable Indigenous subjects whose desires would align with those of the BIA.

Constructing the assimilable native family

The BIA constructed a vision of a successful relocation case based on heteropatriarchal criteria that envisioned Native men as the head of households and breadwinners with Native women serving as wives and mothers and playing a key role in keeping the family rooted in the city. In line with the colonial, racial, and gendered division of labor, the BIA focused recruitment efforts on bringing Native men to cities for industrial wage labor and Native women for socially reproductive labor, either as wives and mothers in their own households or as domestic workers in non-Native households (Blackhawk, 1995; Goeman, 2013; Miller, 2019; O’Neill, 2019; Rosenthal, 2012). The BIA’s screening criteria, which included physical exams, exemplify this: Native women who were pregnant or who had children could only participate in the program if they were married and would be moving to the city with their husbands (Rosenthal, 2012: 55–56).

The BIA Field Office in Chicago saw relocating families as preferable to individuals in the hopes that families would be less likely to return to reservation communities. With that said, they actively discouraged relocated families from maintaining ties with reservation-residing family and kin (BIA Chicago Field Office, 1952c). For example, the BIA Chicago Field Office explicitly discouraged Native women in particular from cultivating social ties on the reservation as they prepared for relocation, as a manual from Field Office stated:

After decision has been made by the family to relocate [sic], the wife should be discouraged from starting new allegiances or community ties such as acceptance of a job, membership on a committee or any other activities which would strengthen her desire to stay in the [reservation] community (Miller, 2019: 102).

As the BIA imagined it, social, civic, or familial ties to a reservation community, even if not through employment, threatened the possibility of a family’s relocation and assimilation into an urban community.

The BIA’s Chicago Field Office’s promotional materials demonstrate how this heteropatriarchal discourse promoted “successful cases” of assimilation and relocation (BIA, 1936–1975a). Among most families highlighted in promotional materials, Native men were wage earners and Native women were homemakers. Native families were often shown receiving advice from white neighbors, employers, or BIA officials to emphasize how they were adjusting to Chicago. The outsides and insides of homes were in sound condition to illustrate how Chicago provided a significant improvement in material conditions and the BIA boasted about strong job placements for relocatees: “More than 1000 American Indians from all over the country have found steady jobs in Chicago and many of them are going to school to learn a profession or a skilled trade” (BIA, 1936–1975b).

Yet, these depictions obscured the actual conditions of many who participated in relocation. Furthermore, as the BIA was aggressively recruiting Native people from reservations and promoting Chicago as an industrial powerhouse, the economy of the city was rapidly changing as manufacturing jobs—often highlighted by the BIA as examples of stable work—were rapidly declining (LaGrand, 2002: 60). The BIA emphasized the success of skilled and semi-skilled workers while ignoring this major shift and the fact that unskilled workers often found themselves confined to temporary day work (Aronson, 1978). Lastly, in contrast to the BIA’s carefully curated depictions, housing conditions were often substandard, and evictions were common. For example, many Native people were displaced from Hyde Park on the South Side after the city carried out a major urban renewal project (with the goal of slowing down Black in-migration to white middle-class areas) (Hirsch, 1983; LaGrand, 2002). As a result of their displacement, Native families moved increasingly to the North Side of the city, only to face deteriorating conditions in Uptown and surrounding neighborhoods (LaGrand, 2002).

To carefully construct an image of an assimilable relocated Native family, the BIA Field Office in Chicago also distanced itself from Native Chicago residents who did not come to the city through Relocation. Within the first couple of years of the program, BIA Chicago Field Office reports began to discuss the challenge of an increasing number of Native people seeking services from the Field Office after coming to Chicago independent of the relocation program. BIA officials described themselves as ill-equipped to handle these cases that should instead be directed to social services in Chicago. Ultimately, BIA Chicago Field Office officials decided to offer more limited services in these cases, focusing on referring them to another agency and then only afterward helping with job searching and housing services, whereas in other cases of families the BIA selected for relocation, the field office would provide immediate financial, housing, and job placement services (BIA Chicago Field Office, 1952d). While the field office pointed to their limited resources, they also expressed anxiety about handling emergencies from non-relocated families, due to them tarnishing the reputation of the relocation program and its selection of families seemingly more fit for adjustment in the city:

An unduly number of these cases washes out on the employment level because of ill-advised plans, medical problems etc., thus undermining good will that is being built up with our employers on our program cases (BIA Chicago Field Office, 1952d).

The BIA added further that,

Employers as well as community people tend to lump program and non-program cases together when referred by this office and get the impression that the Bureau is bringing many people to Chicago without proper financial help, thus presenting the community with a sizable problem of maladjustment and relief (BIA Chicago Field Office, 1952d).

The BIA drew on an ableist and anti-Indigenous framing of imagining certain Native people as being ill-equipped for the modern city. Furthering their goals of expecting relocation to carry out assimilation and integration, the BIA attempted to distance itself from Native people who faced various challenges and acute needs. In this rationale, the anti-Indigenous anxieties of non-Native Chicago residents and employers were a higher priority than the needs of Native people struggling in the city. This separation of relocated and non-relocated Native people reflected a general trend in BIA’s management of the relocation program throughout the country; BIA field offices were troubled by Indigenous networks of residential mobility, which had often been established for many years to adapt to seasonal labor patterns, such as among the Ojibwe in the Upper Midwest (Kent-Stoll, 2024; Miller, 2019). Indigenous mobility and agency outside of the strictures of relocation threatened the BIA’s attempts to neatly craft a colonial assimilationist narrative of bewildered Native residents encountering the modern city for the first time and thus needing the BIA’s supervision or surveillance.

The BIA’s vision of relocation reflected a settler colonial logics of urban space, in which modern space is articulated through an explicit or implicit discourse of Indigenous erasure (e.g., Addie and Fraser, 2019; Barraclough, 2018; Grandinetti, 2018; Montalva Barba, 2024). In the case of the BIA’s articulation of what constituted an assimilable family fit for relocation, the explicit criteria relied on ableist, heteropatriarchal standards alongside the expectation that Native people with potential for urbanization and modernization shed themselves of Indigeneity—or at least Indigenous ties to the reservation and Indigenous political visions that exceeded the BIA. But Indigeneity did not disappear into the city, even if that is what the BIA had envisioned and expected through relocation. While Native people who came to Chicago to seek better job opportunities often struggled economically, they continued to maintain kinship relations within and beyond the city, for example, by remaining politically engaged with both reservation and urban Native communities while forging new connections in the city (Chicago American Oral History Project, 1982; LaGrand, 2002; Miller, 2019). This emergence challenged the BIA’s logics of assimilation and Indigenous erasure by reclaiming Chicago’s city spaces as Indigenous land while articulating a pan-Indigenous social and political community.

Against dispossession and assimilation: The Chicago Indian village

While the BIA attempted to carry out Relocation in a colonial assimilationist manner that sought to undermine Indigenous leadership and forms of kinship and community-building, relocated Native people critiqued and challenged the program at different turns. Early in the program, as discussed earlier, Native people aimed to develop their own decision-making processes through the American Indian Club, which the BIA had hoped to use as a facilitator of smooth relations between the BIA and Native people and thus help the BIA more easily carry out its goals and aims. Entering the third decade of the program, the BIA continued to face criticism, this time centering on the poor quality of housing experienced by many relocated families, which became a prism through which a more sustained critique of relocation and the settler colonial state more broadly was leveled. This critique and confrontation dovetailed with the national trend of Native communities challenging the dispossessory logics of termination and relocation policies (Fixico, 1986; Kent-Stoll, 2024; Miller, 2019).

On May 5, 1970, Carol Warrington, a 35-year-old Menominee woman who had come to Chicago through the relocation program, was evicted with her six children from her Lakeview neighborhood apartment in Chicago’s North Side for not paying rent. Warrington had been withholding rent until her landlord agreed to fix the apartment building’s deteriorating conditions. In response to her eviction, the Native American Committee—a coalition of young Native activists formed in Chicago a year earlier in response to their more confrontational political approaches not aligning with the American Indian Center—joined Warrington in a solidarity protest. They set up a teepee and tents in an empty lot across the street from Wrigley Field (close to Warrington’s apartment). Some left after a couple of days since they felt their protest sent a message to Chicago’s landlords (LaGrand, 2002). Others who had been discussing fighting for Native people’s rights to housing, education, and welfare committed to staying and formed what would become the Chicago Indian Village (CIV), which quickly became a hub where Native and non-Native people were welcomed to gather in community (Aronson, 1978; LaGrand, 2002; Winters, ca. 1970). Mike Chosa (Ojibwe) was voted in to serve as Chief of CIV and approximately 75 to 100 stayed in the encampment for about 3 months before being evicted by the Chicago Police. (Aronson, 1978). Assistant Editor of the Chicago Indian Village newsletter, John Glass, described how the CIV’s fight represented a refusal to be disappeared into the settler city:

The tepee in the foreground of the Urban Skyline represents the pride and hope of a forlorn people. It represents the dreams of better things to come, not to a vanquished and defeated people now, but to people emerging from forced humiliation, exploitation, and deceit, and once again are gaining the respect and pride our forefathers displayed so many ages ago (Glass, 1970).

CIV recognized how BIA relocation policies had sought to tear Indigenous people away from their land bases while providing inadequate resources in the city. CIV newsletter editor Ronnie Winters made this connection between assimilation policies, urban poverty, and eviction facing Native people in Chicago and how CIV sought to respond to them, focusing specifically on the hyper-exploitation and dispossession of Native women:

After days of walking the streets in search of decent housing for her two children, an Indian mother trudged wearily on home with worry heavy on her frail shoulders. There she found her furniture in the alley. Tears came to her eyes as she had nowhere to go and no one to turn to. The urban Indians are the forgotten Indians. The tribes you come from no longer matters. You are alone. This does not have to be longer. The Chicago Indians Village is open for all Indians, seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day (Winters, ca. 1970).

Winters’ depiction reflects CIV’s focus on both dire material conditions, with its focus on housing, as well as on combatting the alienating effects of relocation, with its emphasis on cultivating a pan-Indigenous space “open for all Indians.”

CIV demands included both housing and land. The protest movement addressed how the dispossessory policies of the BIA overlapped and intersected with the exploitative and dispossessory urban policies carried out by Chicago’s business and political class. Thus, CIV protests targeted multiple networks of power in the city (LaGrand, 2002). They made demands on the Chicago Housing Authority, the federal government, local donors to American Indian organizations (to increase their support), and local property owners. Like the Native American Committee—which CIV formed partially out of—CIV distanced itself from older Native-run and Native-serving organizations such as the American Indian Center and St. Augustine’s Center. In contrast to these organizations, which served as critical hubs for community gatherings and social services while at times taking a more conciliatory approach to political and business elites, CIV openly targeted the city of Chicago and local donors, demanding from them housing and land (LaGrand, 2002).

Openly challenging city elites also garnered CIV attention and support from the Young Patriots Organization, a white Southerner-led movement based in the Uptown neighborhood that joined with the Puerto Rican-led Young Lords and the Black Panther Party as part of the Rainbow Coalition to fight capitalism and racism (Sonnie, 2021). The Young Patriots supported and joined with CIV when they helped CIV’s occupation of a vacant apartment building on the North Side that was owned by the city to continue to raise the issue of exploitative housing conditions (Sonnie, 2021). ¹ This was just one of many of CIV’s protest actions against exploitation and dispossession in the city.

After being kicked out of their first encampment, CIV staged a series of protests throughout the city. For example, in January of 1971, they gathered at the home of W. Clement Stone, “a longtime friend and benefactor of the Chicago Indian community,” seemingly to challenge Stone to expand his support (LaGrand, 2002: 238). CIV reclaimed the land the house sat on, offering a 99-year lease to Stone if he agreed to provide $50,000 to CIV. But instead, Stone agreed only to provide a $7000 loan for CIV’s new landscaping business (LaGrand, 2002). Two months later, in March 1971, they staged a sit-in protest in the basement of the Fourth Presbyterian Church, demanding and securing $2500 for emergency housing for unhoused Native people. Similar to their gathering at C. Clement Stone’s home, the location was perhaps chosen due to a likelihood of gaining support and winning demands. Later that same month, CIV occupied an abandoned three-story apartment building at 1142 West Ainslie Street as they continued to make demands on the city for adequate housing while facing raids from the Chicago Police. On June 13, a fire in the building forced 45 CIV members out. Thereafter, the organization regrouped and decided to claim abandoned federal lands at the Belmont Harbor Missile Base along Lake Michigan, in line with a common tactic of the larger Red Power Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s (Smith and Warrior, 1996). This focus on land reclamation, not only in and around reservations but also in urban areas, reflected an awareness of land dispossession as the root cause of anti-Indigenous oppression in both rural and urban areas (Smith and Warrior, 1996; also see Coulthard, 2014).

While by this point, CIV had faced multiple police raids as well as castigations from local media and community organizations for being caustic and unrealistic, they pushed forward in their fight, escalating their demands beyond housing alone and toward more openly redressing dispossession through reclaiming federal land. As Mike Chosa described it, treaties negotiated between the U.S. and Native Nations in the 1830s made clear that Native Nations could reclaim abandoned federal lands; thus, they decided to “take over Belmont [Harbor Missile Base] and test the legality of these treaties” (as quoted in Aronson, 1978). As the CIV had no indication of fizzling out and their demands escalated, the Nixon administration began to step in with negotiators seeking to engage “the broader Indian community while getting the militants within acceptable bounds.” Meanwhile, Mayor Richard J. Daley’s administration continued to clamp down. On July 1, Chicago Park District workers moved into the Belmont Harbor Missile Base to cut down a fence CIV had been using to protect themselves and manage the space. CIV tried to stop the workers and in response, the Chicago Police, equipped with riot gear, ambushed CIV, and a day-long battle ensued, leading to the arrest of 12 CIV members and the movement’s eventual eviction from the base (LaGrand, 2002: 242).

While the settler state called upon violence to drive Native people out of Belmont Harbor, it also refused to openly acknowledge the stakes that this level of violence entailed. While the battle with police at Belmont Harbor may not readily register with urban sociological or urban historical frameworks as war—but rather perhaps as a riot or rebellion met with a police crackdown—warfare may register more readily when considering these events from the vantage point of a theory of the settler colonial state. Harold Potts, an Ojibwe man in his early twenties, was arrested and charged with arson for setting a boat on fire during the battle. In his defense, he argued in court for understanding state violence enacted against CIV as warfare. Potts’ lawyer, Richard A. Halprin, argued that “Potts could not be tried on the [arson] charge because the torching of the boat was an act of war” that constituted justified self-defense in response to the state’s attack since the treaty signed between the federal government and the Ojibwe in 1830 had been broken by federal government as a result of not it ensuring adequate “land, schooling, and opportunities to hunt and fish [for the Ojibwe]” (Anon, 1972). This is not to say that CIV’s reclamation of Belmont Harbor was focused solely on the Ojibwe and federal government’s neglect of this nation. Rather, reflecting the pan-Indigenous politics of the larger Red Power movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, CIV’s focus was on reclaiming federal lands as a response to the federal government’s oppression of American Indians across all nations and breaking hundreds of treaties, which often included agreements to cease hostilities in exchange for Native nations being guaranteed certain lands and essential services (Deloria, 1969; LaGrand, 2002; Smith and Warrior, 1996). Thus, the argument put forth by Potts and Halprin reflected the CIV’s and the larger Indigenous rights movement’s focus on challenging the federal government for its neglect of Indigenous people and abrogation of treaties.

After their eviction from Belmont Harbor, beginning on July 30, 1971, CIV reclaimed land in the Argonne Forest in DuPage County outside Chicago. The site they claimed was also an abandoned missile site, comprised of 80 acres owned by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which had plans to transfer the land to the state for a recreational facility (Canfield, 1971a). CIV claimed the land and made plans to develop an ecological education institute and a school for Native children (Canfield, 1971b). Carol Warrington, who had helped kickstart the movement with her rent strike, by this point was battling local authorities over a charge for removing her children from public school and was speaking out against anti-Indigenous racism in school curricula, expressing a desire to see the case go to “the Supreme Court so we can get the curricula changed so there will be equal representation for all minority groups [in textbooks]” (Canfield, 1971b). Federal officials came to Argonne to negotiate with CIV, who were represented by Sidney Beane (Oceti Sakowin), Betty Chosa Jack (Ojibwe), and Freddy Dennison (Navajo and Apache) (Canfield, 1971b). Yet federal negotiators refused to cede any demands regarding the land.

By this point, amid Indigenous resistance to both termination and relocation, the Nixon administration rhetorically shifted its posture toward Indian policy as one that embraced self-determination and would not aggressively pursue termination and relocation. In his July 1970 announcement ushering in this approach, Nixon promised to explore approaches to mitigate urban poverty among Indigenous populations and revisit and review treaties (Nixon, 1999 [1970]). Despite this clear rhetorical change, Nixon’s vision was ultimately ensconced within a settler-colonial logic, focusing on the management of social services in a way that would still restrict the free exercise of Indigenous sovereignty and any collective claims to power or land (Kent-Stoll, 2024). For example, following this proclamation of self-determination, Nixon fired federal employees advocating for more progressive reforms, failed to rein in corporate extraction on Indigenous lands, and violently cracked down on Indigenous protesters in D.C. aiming to negotiate broken treaties (Forbes, 1981; Smith and Warrior, 1996). Nixon’s approach was effectively to provide rhetorical support for self-determination as a cover for his plan to continue to undermine Indigenous nations’ efforts towards self-determination by treating tribal governments as local managers of policies determined by the federal government (Forbes, 1981). It is this approach that can explain the Nixon administration’s refusal to negotiate with the CIV on the question of land.

The CIV’s confrontational approach was a threat to a settler colonial state intent on endorsing self-determination in only words but not in practice. Concerned Citizens of DuPage County, a coalition of non-Native, mostly white residents of DuPage County who gathered over 1000 signatures on a petition calling for the AEC to respect CIV’s claims to the land, (Siddon, 1971) clearly identified this contradiction in a pamphlet they shared to raise awareness and support for CIV:

Let’s face it. The real problem is Nixon and the White House. Nixon wants. . .to ceremonially hand over all 2040 acres to Du Page Forest Preserves, to get a lot of credit for ‘giving land to the people.’ The Indians are just in the way. That’s why Dunbar and AEC is getting white house pressure. That’s why Verduin at OEO and in the task force is getting White House Pressure. NIXON IS THE ONE!! (Virgil J. Vogel Research and Personal Papers, 1941–1993).

After talks with the federal government broke down over the question of land, CIV secured an offer from the Chicago Housing Authority to help build 132 housing units and a cultural center in Uptown. However, CIV turned down the deal since it did not include any rights to the land at Argonne or anywhere else in the Chicago region (LaGrand, 2002). That is, the bedrock of settler colonial domination—Indigenous land dispossession—was maintained by the federal government and the city. Soon after, because of leadership disagreements within the movement and multiple attacks on the movement from the state, CIV began to break apart with some members under the leadership of Chosa leading a series of actions before the organization officially disbanded in the summer of 1972.

Conclusion

This article has examined the dynamics of the BIA’s Urban Relocation program in Chicago, analyzing how the BIA imagined and represented Chicago, what images and criteria the BIA relied on to represent successfully relocated families, and how Indigenous people critiqued and protested relocation. Urban sociological and historical scholarship on postwar urban inequality has tended to marginalize or obscure urban Indigenous experiences, including policies directly affecting Indigenous peoples (Gotham, 2014; Hirsch, 1983; Massey and Denton, 1993; Mele, 2017; Rothstein, 2017; Sugrue, 2014). When colonialism is mentioned, it is done so as a distant past or used as a metaphor to describe racial domination affecting populations other than Indigenous people (Jackson, 2017; Kent-Stoll, 2020; Mays, 2023). As a result, this literature is ill-equipped to explain how the BIA represented Chicago and Native families relocated to the city. Thus, to examine the dynamics of relocation in Chicago, this paper has relied on the analytical frameworks of settler colonial urbanism, which examines how urban spatial inequality is shaped by Indigenous erasure and the continued seizure and occupation of Indigenous land (e.g., Blatman-Thomas and Porter, 2019; Clarno, 2017; Estes, 2019; Grandinetti, 2018; Launius and Boyce, 2021; Montalva Barba, 2024), and urban indigeneity, which focuses on Indigenous modes of urban space-making that resist and exceed settler colonial domination (Goeman, 2013; Low, 2016; Mays, 2022; Thrush, 2009; Tomiak, 2017). These analytical frameworks explain the logics of the relocation program and Indigenous responses, which respectively hinged on desires and expectations for Indigenous dispossession through assimilation and, as a counter, the reclamation of Indigenous communities and lands.

The BIA imagined Chicago as a modern, civilized city in contrast to the backwardness of reservations. This imaginary relied on an erasure or derision of Indigenous presence and movement that preceded and exceeded relocation policy, as well as an anti-Black mapping of the city that separated “blighted” areas from “desirable” areas, the latter of which Native people were expected to successfully integrate into. To facilitate this integration, the BIA aimed to produce pliable subjects within the logics of an assimilable heteropatriarchal Native family. In response to these assimilatory and dispossessory expectations, the Native-led Chicago Indian Village (CIV) critiqued and challenged these settler colonial logics of erasure, protesting both the exploitative housing conditions and the colonial logics of land theft and dispossession perpetuated through relocation. To return to Coulthard (2014), these struggles over land and belonging in Chicago can be read through the frame of dispossession: relocation policies were driven by the BIA’s expectations for Indigenous peoples to relinquish ties to their homelands through assimilating into the modern city, while the CIV reasserted Indigenous sovereignty in the city. At the same time, the BIA’s reliance on anti-Black discourses of blight reveals how the relocation program intersected with racial segregation, but toward the goal of Indigenous assimilation and erasure.

Following evictions and being subjected to state violence, CIV was unable to secure any claims to the land, demonstrating the limits of the federal government’s turn to “self-determination” during this moment. At the same time, CIV’s protests also demonstrate the aspects of the settler colonial project of relocation that failed. The resurgence of Indigenous relationality and identification through CIV refused the BIA’s desires to disappear Indigenous people into the city. A previous historical account of this movement from LaGrand (2002) argued that CIV did not achieve significant victories because of leadership problems and the inability to focus on one or two demands at a time. Like virtually all movements, there were internal disagreements over leadership and demands; however, CIV remained consistent in two major demands: housing and land. Shifting the demand from solely housing to also land targeted the root of the problem that Native people faced in cities and reservations under settler colonialism: dispossession. The City of Chicago, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), and the federal government’s shared unwillingness to negotiate on the question of land and cede only minimal demands related to affordable housing demonstrates the multi-scalar organization of settler colonialism managed and protected by the state. CIV’s targeting of multiple actors at the same time was a logical response to this multi-scalar organization. Moreover, ceding demands on housing but not land demonstrates that the settler colonial state was willing to negotiate the levels of intensity of Native people’s exploitation but not question the dispossession that makes possible this exploitation in the first place. This contradiction lay at the heart of the logics of relocation: promising to improve material conditions through relocation while leaving the fundamental structure of settler colonialism built off dispossession unperturbed and then eliding over it through Nixon’s shallow “self-determination” rhetoric.

This article’s analysis of the history of urban relocation extends the literature on the racial politics of urban space (e.g., Gotham, 2014; Hirsch, 1983; Mele, 2017; Sugrue, 2014) by bringing in an analysis of the settler colonial dimensions of urban space. In that regard, framing the U.S. as an empire state sustained by the racial and colonial management of territories and spaces—including urban spaces—allows for an understanding of how colonial dispossession is not only a foundational historical moment of the state, but rather an enduring structure shaping regimes of inequality and belonging in the city (Jung and Kwon, 2013). As opposed to urban sociological scholarship that obscures Indigenous dispossession by historically marginalizing it or treating is as metaphor (Gotham, 2014; Hirsch, 1983; Massey and Denton, 1993; Mele, 2017; Rothstein, 2017; Sugrue, 2014), this study found that Indigenous dispossession and erasure through relocation and the denial of Indigenous sovereignty were central to how the state (via the BIA) imagined and managed Chicago as a postwar city. Relatedly, understanding the settler colonial dynamics of Indigenous dispossession requires moving beyond the taken-for-granted purview of state institutions within urban sociology (including city, state, and federal actors dealing directly with urban policy) by bringing in an analysis of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. This is not to say that research on Indigenous experiences in U.S. cities should be restricted to an analysis of federal Indian policy, as doing so can limit an understanding of the diversity of experiences across different Native Nations (Deloria, 2003; Mays, 2023). With that said, integrating analyses of federal Indian policy and urban policy is a key step to move away from urban sociological and historical accounts of modern U.S. cities that reproduce discourses of Indigenous erasure. In that regard, while future scholarship might consider foregrounding the settler colonial foundations of urban political economies, work in this area can also bring in scholarship from Indigenous studies on how Native people have negotiated, built community within and across, and provided critiques of the politics of modern U.S. cities (e.g., Goeman, 2013; Mays, 2022; Ramirez, 2007). By doing so, settler colonial violence will not be confined to a pre-history of the modern city, but understood as an enduring structure of its reproduction, alongside anti-Blackness and racial capitalism. Such an integrated approach provides possibilities to deepen urban sociological and historical accounts of regimes of displacement and inequality as well as modes of resistance in the modern city.