Spotlight on Indigenous Relocation

This special is from a panel event inspired by a documentary from Minnesota Public Radio and APM Reports called, Uprooted: The 1950s Plan to Erase Indian Country by MPR News reporter and producer Max Nesterak.

A straightforward, insightful discussion of the cultural effects of ongoing trauma and mental health impacts from the federal government’s American Indian Relocation Program designed in the 1950s to assimilate Indigenous people into white-centric society and eliminate tribal governments and culture.

Today, the majority of Indigenous people in the U.S., about 70-percent, live in urban areas. When the federal government started Relocation in the 1950s, fewer than eight-percent lived in cities.

The federal government has admitted the Relocation program did not actually deliver on promises from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to provide housing and job-placement assistance. Philleo Nash, a former B.I.A. Commissioner who oversaw the Relocation program, later called it, “essentially a one-way ticket from rural to urban poverty. Relocation was an underfunded, ill-conceived program with a negative name.” The failed assimilation plan became a significant factor in historical trauma that Indigenous people living in cities and on reservations are continually challenged by.

Recorded at the Minneapolis American Indian Center, Indigenous experts from around the country delve spoke with a primarily Indigenous audience about the impacts of historical trauma in their community and the resiliency factors that empower so many to overcome persistent systems of discrimination.

Hosted by Anton Treuer, Ph.D. (Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe) Professor of Ojibwe at Bemidji State University. Author of Everything You Wanted to Know About Indians But Were Afraid to Ask and other titles.

Panelists:

Delores Subia BigFoot, Ph.D. (Caddo Nation of Oklahoma, affiliated with Northern Cheyenne Tribe of Montana) - Director of Indian Country Child Trauma Center and Native American Programs at University of Oklahoma College of Medicine

Ann Bullock, MD (Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa) - Chief Clinical Consultant of Family Medicine and Director of the Division of Diabetes Treatment and Prevention at Indian Health Service

Dorene Day (Bois Forte Band of Chippewa, Nett Lake) - Midewiwin kwe, Anishinaabe midwife, traditional practitioner, educator, trainer