Retribalization in Urban Indian Communities

Abstract

In the 1970s, the late Bob Thomas (Cherokee) of the University of Arizona warned that Indian people were becoming “ethnic Indians” with no tribal knowledge or connection, especially in the intertribal, interethnic urban environment. “There is now a whole generation of Indians,” he argued, “who have been born, raised and socialized in the city.... A great many city raised Indians are not distinctively Indian in the way that they behave or the way that they think about things”; and later, “I’m not so sure in my mind if Indians can exist as city people. The city really cuts one off from the ‘natural’ world. Can the Indian’s sacred world continue in a world of concrete and automobiles?” Social relations of Indians in cities, moreover, take place primarily with non-Indians: “American Indians do not live in old-style, bounded, ethnic neighborhoods as did earlier immigrants, but are scattered throughout the population,” which means that “There is very little of an Indian community in most cities. There are Indians living in cities and there are Indian centers in cities ... and you see some Indians involved with Indian centers. But they are a minority of the Indians who live in cities.”\nAmong Indians in cities, tribal knowledge, identity, and connection were being displaced by pan-Indianism, which, along with its associated urban residence, were major threats to Indian people in his view.

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