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American Indians leave Uptown behind - Native Land - Chicago neighbourhood
Chicago Reporter, The, July-August, 2002 by Stephanie Williams
Marilyn Miller was 12 when she and her family arrived in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood during the hot and muggy summer of 1967. Looking for better job opportunities, they moved from the Lac du Flambeau Chippewa reservation in northern Wisconsin under a federal program known as relocation that offered stipends to American Indians who wanted to move from reservations into cities starting in 1952.
The family moved into an apartment at 4939 N. Broadway St. But Miller was disappointed with her new home.
"The quality, the area, the look didn't match the idea of what I had. Everything was dirty and cluttered. The big city didn't seem so pretty anymore," Miller recalled. "I choked back the tears."
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She debated whether to tell her dad, a loving but stern man, how she felt. When she did finally muster up the courage, he told her they were staying in Chicago.
"'You never go back, you always move forward,'" Miller said he told her.
Except for a year and a half in the early 1990s, she has lived in Chicago ever since.
Her story is a common one: Thousands of Native Americans moved to Chicago from reservations and other rural areas in the second half of the 20th century. As community and social service organizations were established in or near Uptown, the area soon became the anchor of the city's American Indian community.
Data from the 2000 Census show that the city's American Indian population has continued to grow. Though a small share of Chicago's total population, their numbers increased 47 percent in the 1990s, to 10,290.
But, for the first time since 1950, Uptown is no longer Chicago's Native American population center, The Chicago Reporter found.
Uptown lost 269 of its 652 Native American residents between 1990 and 2000, according to the census. Several community areas that are mostly Latino are now home to Chicago's largest Native American populations.
American Indians reside in every community area in Chicago and are found in many of its nearby suburbs, census data show.
Some American Indian leaders say the census doesn't accurately reflect the size of their community because many residents don't fill out census forms. Still, they note that many residents have moved out of Uptown and surrounding areas in the past 10 years because they can no longer afford to live there.
"The biggest thing is the housing," said Miller, who shares a home with her two adult daughters in nearby Irving Park. Miller volunteers with several American Indian agencies in Uptown.
Between 1990 and 2000, the neighborhood went through racial change, gaining 2,041 white residents, who now make up 42 percent of the population, up from 39 percent.
Faith Smith, president of the Native American Educational Services (NEAS) College, a private Native American-owned college at 2838 W. Peterson Ave., has been active in Chicago's American Indian community for more than 20 years. A longtime Uptown resident, she acknowledged that many of Uptown's Native Americans struggle to find affordable housing.
But gentrification is not the sole reason American Indian residents have left, Smith said, pointing out that redevelopment has been going on in Uptown for more than 10 years.
"There are American Indians who move because they choose to, and nothing else," said Smith, who is a member of the Ojibwe tribe. "Indians are not a monolithic group."
Others note that many Latinos have Native American heritage.
Marliza S. Rivera, 37, is both Mexican and Kiowa but identifies herself as Native American. She lives in Pilsen, a predominantly Mexican neighborhood on the near Southwest Side that gained Native American residents during the 1990s. Pilsen falls within the Lower West Side community area, whose American Indian population tripled, to 430 residents.
"It was easy to assimilate into the Mexican culture here and not forfeit my Indian heritage," Rivera said. "The Mexican community is very accepting."
Even with the population shifts, most American Indians in Chicago still view Uptown as the center of their community; said Patricia Tyson, coordinator of social services for 19 years at St. Augustine's Center for American Indians, an agency at 4512 N. Sheridan Road.
"It's sort of like if you took and put the wagon wheel with the hub over Uptown and then just extend it from there," said Tyson, 69, who is Sioux and Irish.
Native Ground
Chicago has one of the largest urban Native American communities in the country; said Robert Galler, interim director of the D'Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian History at the Newberry Library, 60 W. Walton St.
American Indians lived in the Chicago area long before the city developed. But "there was an influx" beginning in the 1950s with relocation, Galler said.
The program was intended to help Native Americans move from impoverished reservations into job-rich cities, including Los Angeles, Minneapolis and Chicago. In some cases, the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs subsidized housing.
But many struggled in their new cities, said Donald L. Fixico, a professor of American Indian history at the University of Kansas.
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