Indians on the Move: Native American Mobility and Urbanization in the Twentieth Century

In Indians on the Move, Douglas K. Miller examines Native American urban migration in the twentieth century, with a particular focus on the experiences of Native people who participated in the federal government’s relocation program of the 1950s and 1960s. Historians have generally depicted relocation as a disaster, a misguided assimilation policy that failed to deliver on its promise of greater prosperity for Indian people. Miller complicates this image in two ways. First, he situates the relocation program within a broader history of Native American urban migration, reminding us that going to the city was already a familiar experience for Indian people by the middle of the century. Second, he argues that, in studying relocation, we should shift our attention from the goals of the policy to the aspirations of Native people who embraced migration as an economic tactic. Urban migrants, he suggests, expanded the scope and possibilities of...