WORLD WAR TWO hastened the mobility of Ojibwe people, who became part of a nationwide social movement that would relocate nearly 80 percent of the American Indian population to cities by the end of the twentieth century. The war took on added resonance since the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 ensured that all eligible men might be drafted, deploying young soldiers from rural reservation communities to the battle zones of distant lands. It motivated men and women to leave behind the worst aspects of reservation poverty and opened doors to new opportunities, especially in defense and other wartime industries and jobs that arose due to shortages. Ojibwe women left home to work as army nurses, or to serve elsewhere in the armed forces. Minneapolis and surrounding metropolitan counties, especially the city’s Phillips neighborhood, became a center for Indian population growth and community connections even before the U.S. government initiated the Urban Relocation Program of the 1950s. Those who stayed on in the city found other Indians, and a kinship was forged among peoples who shared cultural bonds and a common history of colonialism and pain inflicted in the form of boarding schools, assimilation, and the loss of land. Ignatia Broker, one of the Ojibwe from White Earth who arrived in Minneapolis during the war, described the urban solidarity of nations as “an island from which a revival of spirit began.”1 Minneapolis was home to a new generation, living in cities and interacting within an expansive network of tribes and identities.
World War Two represented a time of tremendous change for American Indians, and one can imagine an abrupt end to one way of life and the beginning of a modern, urban reality for those transplanted to the city. Yet despite facing new and difficult conditions outside the reservation, the many who left consistently found ways to create community and preserve family ties. Migrating Ojibwe women gathered with relatives and friends and exchanged information. In postwar cities, they acted in response to the growing needs of their families and other Indian people by developing new ideas about labor, but they did so in unique ways that linked the values of the traditional Ojibwe economy to the city. Rather than abandon cultural ideas about work, women reimagined and reshaped their labor in ways that were of greatest worth to the Indian community.
In 1900, the Ojibwe population was overwhelmingly rural and reservation-based, but as it rebounded in the mid-twentieth century it became more urban with each passing decade. World War Two allowed some Ojibwe women to gain a foothold in the city because of the prospect of wartime employment; later, the GI Bill provided other incentives to returning soldiers and their families. The controversial postwar termination and relocation policies of the federal government encouraged further American Indian resettlement in cities. In the 1950s and 1960s, conservatives in the U.S. Congress moved to “terminate” federal responsibility and financial support to Indian tribes, abandon treaty responsibilities, and sponsor the movement of Indian people into cities. The policy was a disaster for tribes terminated early on, and the Ojibwe at North Dakota’s Turtle Mountains were slated for termination until the example of the Menominee of Wisconsin turned into an unmitigated catastrophe. Termination immediately destabilized Indian economies and lowered standards of health. Once termination ended, in the early 1970s, the urban Indian population of Minneapolis and its metropolitan counties exceeded that in almost any other American city. The 1990 U.S. Census was considered a landmark for revealing that slightly more than half of the American Indian population lived in urban areas.2 The census also indicated an Ojibwe population of 103,826 (not including the Canadian Ojibwe population of approximately the same size), making the Ojibwe the third-largest tribal group in the United States, after the Navajo and the Cherokee. Twenty-first-century census estimates revealed an even larger Indian population in cities.3
The Ojibwe in the upper Midwest struggled for physical and cultural survival in the aftermath of the post-allotment looting of reservations, and they found their land base dwindling from the ravages of timber companies and other land sharks who systematically swindled Ojibwe allotments across the Great Lakes region, from Bay Mills to White Earth. Another predator was the county tax office, which illegally seized countless Ojibwe allotments. The loss of tribal homelands touched off the urban migration that continued for most of the twentieth century. Nationally, statistics make plain the decline in tribal land-ownership. The allotment of reservations formally ended in 1934, during the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, a time when American Indians were reduced to ownership of 48 million acres of homeland, down from the 138 million they possessed in 1887.4
Once Ojibwe people were dispossessed of their best land for hunting, fishing, and gathering, the formerly dependable seasonal economy languished in the Great Lakes region. Problems of poor nutrition, disability, and disease arose, which further compromised Ojibwe lives and livelihoods in the communities. By the Great Depression, opportunities for wage work in lumber camps and border towns dried up, and despite the efforts of the CCC-ID, steady employment remained difficult to find. World War Two would introduce a variety of new economic opportunities for the Ojibwe, and real job prospects in nearby cities encouraged migration even before the emergence of the federally sponsored relocation programs. In this complex setting, in the face of these many challenges, men departed for wars, and thousands of Ojibwe men and women migrated to cities in search of jobs.
Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Duluth were popular destinations for Ojibwe people. Women from the plundered White Earth Reservation, a community reduced to poverty and near-landlessness, had begun migrating to Minneapolis as early as the 1920s, but their numbers increased greatly during the war years. Some already mothers, these women found jobs in the city and often switched employers or moved in response to changing opportunities. Their participation in the urban labor force was motivated by an array of family and community priorities. Before the growth of a sizable Indian community in postwar Minneapolis and St. Paul, life could be lonely for young women in the city. In one example from 1924, a young mother, during breaks from long days working in the linen room at the Ryan Hotel in downtown St. Paul, wrote letters to her three sons at boarding school as she worked toward their future together in the Twin Cities.5
Ojibwe women formed personal networks with other Indian people that were essential to their survival in the city. Their early efforts were an expression of indigenous values that resulted in the emergence of distinctive urban Indian communities in the Great Lakes region. One leader, Emily Peake, was from a White Earth family that had come to Minneapolis, where she was born in 1920 and later began school. During World War Two, she worked at Honeywell, making parachutes, before joining the Women’s Coast Guard in 1944. She attended the University of Minnesota on the GI Bill, graduating in 1947. Peake and friends formed an early social club for native women during the 1940s in an effort that presaged later significant Indian organizations and centers of community life. After spending time working in Europe, Peake returned to Minneapolis, and during the termination era she helped found the Upper Midwest American Indian Center with Dakota and Ojibwe colleagues.
One of these colleagues was Winnie Jourdain, a young widow with a four-year-old son, who came to Minneapolis from White Earth in 1926. Like Emily Peake, Jourdain was a key figure in the establishment of the early urban Indian community. For the next several decades, she and her group helped other Ojibwe women, including nineteen girls who arrived directly from the Flandreau boarding school during Jourdain’s first months in the city—find jobs and a foothold in their new home. Finding work was difficult for young women without job skills. Jourdain recalled how she landed her first job, with Custom Laundry:
I sent eight letters. I told them I was a widow with a small child and I had no skills but would volunteer to work free for two weeks until I learned the job. I got five answers, and I took the closest one to save carfare. After all, wages weren’t much in those days, just $12 a week.6
As the urban Indian community formed, young women found the transition to city life easier when they arrived with friends from the reservation. Amelia Jones, a young job seeker in Minneapolis, shared her story of arriving in 1943, which was the first time she had left her home in Redby, on the Red Lake Reservation. Not quite a high school graduate, she was seventeen. Jones and four of her friends, all Redby girls, left home together for Minneapolis. Like most Ojibwe women who ventured out in the 1940s, they had few resources but were determined and hardworking.
Rural-to-urban migrations for the poor almost always involve working en route to the final destination. Jones and her girlfriends were no exceptions, first stopping to top onions at a farm, then working in a chicken factory in Wells, Minnesota, before landing in Minneapolis. Arriving with no money or savings, they “went to work right away,” cleaning houses by the day, getting paid every evening. The young women learned of an employment office and found work cleaning rooms downtown at the Hampshire Arms Hotel, where they lived in a basement annex with “lots of Indians.” The experience both terrified and thrilled them; they were teenagers, with no children or husbands, and they felt liberated by the city. Jones recalled their tentative explorations into Minneapolis with humor, remembering that “we were having a big adventure; we were scared to go out at night. We just stayed home, but we managed. . . . We rode the trolley cars to get around town.”7
After living in the city for a time, the girls went their separate ways. Jones completed high school in Minneapolis, then spent eight months in a vocational school cooking program before becoming a cook in the city for the next thirty-five years. She married Leech Lake Ojibwe Leo Fairbanks in the 1950s, and though they met in Minneapolis, she “first saw him driving a fish truck in Red Lake.” Jones was typical of many Ojibwe women who spent their adult working lives in the city: the bonds to her Ojibwe family at Red Lake never diminished, and her apartment became a base for countless relatives who stopped in Minneapolis for shopping trips or to visit sick family members in urban hospitals. She continued to speak Ojibwe with her mother, brothers, and sisters on regular trips to Red Lake. As Jones described her years of urban life, “I always came home. We were always home on the Fourth of July,” the time of the annual pow-wow, and like many of her generation, she returned to Red Lake after retirement.8
One of Jones’ contemporaries among the early community of urban Ojibwe people was Ignatia Broker, who arrived in the city during the year of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and who later wrote an intergenerational memoir of the women in her family, Night Flying Woman. Broker was twenty-two when she began attending night classes and worked in a defense plant; later she wrote about the war years as “unstable for everyone, and more so for the Indian people.” She lived in a tiny, congested room with six other people during the war, sleeping on small cots in shifts. Still, they opened their door to other Ojibwe who needed a hand.
Though Ojibwe women found jobs in the city, they became part of a decades-long struggle for human rights and equality in employment, housing, education, and social welfare. Broker and her community experienced racial discrimination on a wide array of fronts.9 She described its impact on the Minneapolis–St. Paul Indian community:
Although employment was good because of the labor demand of the huge defense plants, Indian people faced discrimination in restaurants, night clubs, retail and department stores, in service organizations, public offices, and worst of all, in housing. I can remember hearing, “This room has been rented already, but I got a basement that has a room. I’ll show you.” I looked at the room. It had the usual rectangular window, and pipes ran overhead. The walls and floors were brown cement, but the man with a gift-giving tone in his voice said, “I’ll put linoleum on the floor for you and you’ll have a toilet all to yourself. You could wash at the laundry tubs.” There was, of course, nothing listed with the War Price and Rationing Board, but the man said it would cost seven dollars a week. I know that he would have made the illegal offer only to an Indian because he knew of the desperate housing conditions we, the first Americans, faced.10
Many of the Ojibwe women who joined the migration to urban areas had failed to find jobs in reservation border towns. These towns capitalized on the presence of the Ojibwe by luring tourists to the north woods with picturesque imagery, but they also locked Indian participants out of the local economy, except as performers and consumers. Bemidji, Minnesota, was thirty miles from the borders of the Red Lake Reservation and a shorter distance from Leech Lake, and was the central shopping destination for hundreds of Ojibwe by mid-century. Roberta Head McKenzie of the Red Lake Reservation remembered, “Oh yes, Bemidji didn’t like us,” even at a time when her two brothers were risking their lives in the military during World War Two. Her father, Selam Head, worked as a lumber grader at the reservation sawmill and toiled for long hours six days a week during the war. McKenzie, small as a child and later a petite adult, was a favorite of an aunt and uncle who had no children, and they helped her attend school in Oklahoma for a time before she returned to Red Lake in 1947 to graduate from high school. After the war, in 1950, McKenzie became a mother while attending a vocational program for secretarial training in Bemidji. Upon finishing her courses, she painfully discovered that the border town was entirely closed to Indians seeking jobs. She began working Saturdays as a file clerk for a small ice cream business in town, but when the owner came into the office and discovered a young Ojibwe woman, McKenzie remembered, “he was really outraged” and “didn’t want me out in front in the office.” She lost even her meager part-time job.11
Without hope of finding work closer to home in Bemidji, McKenzie was accepted into the relocation program in the early 1950s through the Bureau of Indian Affairs area office in Minneapolis; she then spent most of the decade working as a medical secretary at the University of Minnesota. Nationally, the rural-to-urban migration gathered momentum when, in 1952, relocation expanded from the Southwest to more cities, including Cleveland, Dallas, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, San Francisco, and Minneapolis. The relocation program, conceived as the twin to termination, was also part of the federal plan to sever the government’s responsibilities to tribal nations in the postwar years. Relocation offered American Indians over the age of eighteen a hand in seeking urban employment, a bus or train ticket, and sometimes basic toiletries and domestic goods, including the ubiquitous alarm clock, once they arrived. McKenzie recalled those first weeks in Minneapolis.
We went to see the BIA agent and he gave us money to ride the bus. They had streetcars then. We looked around for apartments. And as soon as we found one we notified him and he went there and got some money to pay our rent until we got paid. They would pay our rent and give us food. But see, I had to go a whole month, because the state just paid every two weeks on the 15th and 1st. 12
The BIA relocation program covered apartment rental expenses for the first month in Minneapolis and other designated relocation cities. McKenzie moved into an efficiency apartment with Doris Graves Carlson, a friend from Red Lake who had also attended business school. The program has been sharply criticized for abandoning American Indians who continued to need services and assistance in the city, but McKenzie was prepared for employment and happy for the opportunity to come to Minneapolis and earn a living to support her young family. She had good memories of her relocation, which was not always the case for American Indians, but it is no small point that the Ojibwe found jobs in the city that had been unavailable to them in reservation border towns. Like many relocated Ojibwe people, however, McKenzie conceived of Red Lake as her true community, and she returned in 1958.13
A generation of Ojibwe women stayed in Minneapolis to attend school, seek employment, and raise families. Their efforts and connections were essential to the development of a complex of organizations and networks that formed the bedrock of the urban Indian community. Already tested by growing up on reservations during the war or living in boarding schools, they brought their hard-won knowledge to urban life and forged new communities. Gertrude Howard Buckanaga’s childhood, spent near Ponsford, on the White Earth Reservation, during a time of family rice camps and blueberry picking, was tragically interrupted in 1946 after her mother, Sadie Howard, died in a car accident, leaving behind seven children. In the aftermath, Buckanaga and five brothers and sisters left for Pipestone, one of the Indian boarding schools still operating in the Midwest. Family remained an important part of her life; the children saw one another at meals and on the playground, and their father regularly visited them at school. She first arrived in Minneapolis during the summer of 1952 as a teenager, working as a nanny to a nine-year-old girl, the daughter of a wealthy lawyer. Buckanaga remembered fixing the girl’s meals and taking her to the park, while the little girl introduced her to the library and served as a summer guide, teaching her about the city. After graduating from Pipestone the following year, Buckanaga moved to Minneapolis permanently, at a time when “the Indian community wasn’t as big” as today and most people lived near Elliot Park, near the city’s downtown.14
From the earliest days of the nascent Indian community in Minneapolis, women quickly grew into significant positions of leadership and directed their efforts and labor toward the well-being of children and families. In the process, they created distinctive patterns of white-collar labor around education and social and child welfare. Ojibwe women, including Emily Peake, Gertrude Howard Buckanaga, Frances Fairbanks, Ona Kingbird, Norby Blake, Pat Bellanger, and many others, laid a foundation for new institutions and laws that have been extraordinarily influential and long-lived, not only in Minneapolis but across the United States. They were also adept at influencing a younger, college-educated cohort of Ojibwe women, including Rose Robinson and Vikki Howard, to follow in their footsteps in the community.
Over time, the community grew more focused. Buckanaga recalled the moment in the late 1950s and early 1960s when Indian people began to organize for change in Minneapolis. Informal networks, the ball games and baby showers, were early channels for socialization that led to more lasting efforts in improving community life and social services. A significant moment was the incorporation of the Upper Midwest American Indian Center, in 1961. Buckanaga spoke about the early days:
They used to do a lot of fundraising, grass roots fundraising like raffles and stuff like that, to help other people who were moving into the urban area. I remember when they incorporated because we used to come to all those meetings way back. They were different Indian people at that time that were kind of shakers and movers. I learned a lot from them because they were here and they were helping people move into the urban community. Because I remember people didn’t realize how racist it was. It was really bad before 1964. 15
Buckanaga herself led a sit-in at Concordia College in St. Paul, where she had enrolled, intent on earning an elementary school teaching degree. A mother with children in public school, she had grown exasperated with prejudice and the failure of private and public schools in the Twin Cities to meet the needs of Indian children. She became friends with African-American students and joined forces with them to confront the administration regarding the disproportionate amount of money that went to scholarships for white students. While the public perception was that minorities had a free ride in school, Buckanaga knew the reality from her part-time job in the college’s financial aid office: few scholarships went to minorities. Her concern for the welfare of Indian children led to a lifelong career in education and social work in the St. Paul and Minneapolis public schools. She eventually helped draft the tribal community college bill. Buckanaga gained her license in social work and continued to assist the Indian community, especially by overseeing an extensive array of services to low-income tribal people in Hennepin County starting in 1986, when she became the executive director of the Upper Midwest American Indian Center.
Contemporary activists on adoption issues refer back to the 1940s, the time directly following the boarding school period, as the beginning of the “adoption era” for American Indian children in the United States.16 Reservation hardships and urban poverty had placed a large burden on families; the largely white employees of social service agencies sought solutions to complex problems, including mental illness, alcoholism, and family violence, by removing children not only from the troubled parents but from the Indian community—permanently. It has been estimated that perhaps 25 percent of White Earth children left the reservation for foster and adoptive homes in the postwar years.17 Red Lake and White Earth had the highest rates of child removal within the state of Minnesota, and at the height of the crisis, the “ratio of Indian to non-Indian children in placement was five to one,” while in Wisconsin, “Indian children were placed in either foster care or adoptive homes at a rate of 15 to 17 times higher than other children.”18
During subsequent decades, reservation enrollment offices and staff often felt helpless as Ojibwe adults from across the United States wrote to and phoned councils requesting information about their families, desperate to locate loved ones and understand their own tribal identity. Sandra White Hawk, a Lakota activist and national expert on adoption, credits women in the urban community of Minneapolis–St. Paul for paving the way for the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) of 1978. Women like White Earth tribal member Norby Blake and Peggy Matler, who worked in child welfare during the 1970s, gathered testimony that was used to develop the legislation, though Sen. James Abourezk of South Dakota introduced the act to the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs and is often given credit for the bill. The ICWA was an important recognition of sovereignty in the self-determination era and protected the interests of Indian families and tribal nations “to establish standards for placement of Indian children in foster or adoptive homes, to prevent the break-up of Indian families,” while promoting tribal jurisdiction over child custody proceedings.19
Rose Robinson was a teacher on the Leech Lake Reservation at the time of the passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act, but soon she began working for the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe as a social services program developer. Robinson reminds people that the ICWA was an “unfunded mandate” that left administrators with few means to achieve its goals. In response, she went to local counties in northern Minnesota to request financial support and entered into negotiations with the state to meet the requirements of the new law. Robinson recalled a difficult time when she had to quit working for the Leech Lake Band in the 1980s, discouraged over political issues and feeling that progress was stalled. She also believed that the team of women working for the tribe who were writing and receiving the grants were not respected or recognized for their hard work, as women should be by their Ojibwe colleagues. It helped Robinson to remember her father’s experience working for the tribe and traveling to Washington a generation earlier, and how he had sought out the best possible source for advice, which was his own elderly mother. Robinson drew strength from the example of her father’s reliance on his mother and on the historical “position of respect” for female elders.
Before he went to Washington, DC, that time, he went and sat with my grandma for hours before he went. She spoke Ojibwe. I don’t know what they talked about but he made sure he went to talk with her before he went. She was very sharp and she knew how things should be. She wasn’t mean to anybody but her husband [laughter]. She was not mean. She was very firm. She’d say you can’t be doing that. In Ojibwe. Tell the kids no, no, no. They’d all be scared of her. But she was trying to teach us. We have those old ways that we should really learn from. I think if we did that we’d be a stronger community.20
Robinson left northern Minnesota to work in the Minneapolis community for the Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center. Founded in 1984 to empower women and their families by promoting good health through a comprehensive range of social services, the center was located in the Phillips neighborhood of Minneapolis, by then the third-largest urban Indian community in the country. There, Robinson enjoyed the mentorship of the center’s founding director, Cherokee social worker Margaret Peake Raymond. With a growing résumé of child welfare experience, Robinson took a position as specialist in the field with Minnesota’s Department of Human Services and worked toward her master’s degree in social work at the University of Minnesota. She eventually returned to Leech Lake to be the director of the child welfare program but acknowledged that the work of a child welfare agency is hard, especially as babies are “born positive with drugs in their system,” and even harder because one is “related to half the rez.” Still, Robinson regards her long career in child welfare as “my life’s work” as an Ojibwe woman, and she appreciates the importance of passing on to other women the skills necessary to stand up against the state and county bureaucracies, in a configuration where “the system works against the tribes.”
We had a staff meeting today and I said, “You’re all doing a great job.” This is what we’re here for. This is the tribe taking over this work. It’s not the county saying to the community you’ve got to do it this way. It’s the tribe. We’re involved. It’s about self-determination.21
Ojibwe women became leaders in Minneapolis and sustained community life in the city and on reservations through their activism and family advocacy. Incredibly, they achieved college degrees while raising children as they simultaneously pursued meaningful jobs, cared for parents and other family members, and mentored other women. Rose Robinson remembered the dedication of Gertrude Buckanaga of the Upper Midwest American Indian Center; Frances Fairbanks, founding director of the Minneapolis American Indian Center; and others in Minneapolis during the 1960s and 1970s who each had “this passion to help our communities.”22
When a new Minneapolis American Indian Center opened in 1975 in the Phillips neighborhood, the heart of the urban community, it became a distinctive hub of urban life and social services for an American Indian population that may have exceeded fourteen thousand in both Minneapolis and St. Paul. In the 1970s, the architecturally modern center, with its beautiful wood collage designed by Ojibwe artist George Morrison, was a bright spot on Franklin Avenue, a neighborhood otherwise notorious for urban blight and lively Indian bars. Because the postwar years and the experience of termination were so inextricably linked to poverty, substandard housing, discrimination in education, and a lack of basic services to Indians in the city, these circumstances profoundly influenced the decisions of many Ojibwe women to pursue careers in social welfare to meet the needs of their community. The Minneapolis American Indian Center immediately became a hub of education and social service activity, one that employed many women.
Ignatia Broker, whose husband died during the Korean War, recalled a time when “no Indian family dared approach the relief and welfare agencies of the Twin Cities. They knew that they would only be given a bus ticket and be told to go back to the reservation where the government would take care of them as usual.”23 Women’s activities in developing intertribal organizations and founding Indian centers like those in Minneapolis and Chicago can all be traced to the long list of deficiencies in urban Indian life in the postwar and termination era cities of the Great Lakes region.24 Ojibwe people did not completely escape either poverty or discrimination in the city and were increasingly concerned about police violence toward American Indians in the 1960s and 1970s. Significantly, they also lacked health care and some of the other benefits of residing on the reservation. When a group began meeting in the summer of 1968 to address and challenge the problems urban Indians faced—“prisons, courts, police, treaties, the government,” in the words of Dennis Banks—Ojibwe women were part of every forum. Banks recalled that at an early meeting, when the group still had no formal name, “a woman stood up and said, ‘You always aim to do this and to do that. Why don’t we just call ourselves AIM?’”25 The organization that emerged from that community forum, the American Indian Movement, made Minneapolis into a national center of Indian activism for the next decade.
In 1968, AIM was one of many similar organizations that had emerged in urban areas throughout the United States and Canada with sizable American Indian populations. AIM’s home base was Minneapolis, but soon chapters were organized in cities such as Milwaukee and Cleveland, and over the next few years the group grew into a stronger national organization. During its early days, members directly challenged law enforcement and civil authorities by setting up the AIM Patrol to help combat the problem of police brutality and racism. AIM found high visibility and success in its early years, a time that included momentous episodes, such as the takeover of both Alcatraz Island, near San Francisco, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs building in Washington, D.C., as well as the 1973 events surrounding Wounded Knee. The group’s leaders, especially founders Dennis Banks, Clyde Bellecourt, Eddie Benton-Benai, and George Mitchell, were well-known for their successful use of symbols and the media to publicize problems faced by American Indians in urban areas. Their efforts raised the American consciousness about the historic mistreatment of the indigenous people of the United States and Canada. AIM is acknowledged for the pride it created in American Indians, especially a generation of urban youth, at a time when people were still coping with the postwar policies of termination and relocation.26
Though the conventional narrative of AIM tends to focus on its male founders and early successes, a history of the movement more attentive to the issue of gender produces a very different narrative. Indeed, women’s efforts have been overshadowed by the presence of highly charismatic men, and the rich and significant involvement of these women in AIM has been somewhat hidden in the history of Indian activism. Journalistic reports of that involvement have tended to focus on the lone female figure of Anna Mae Aquash, the Mi’kmaq activist who was murdered during the winter of 1976, yet many women played developmental roles in the movement from the outset. Their work in the early years laid a foundation for new institutions for education and social welfare that have been extraordinarily long-lived in the Indian community.
Women turned their attention to publicizing and solving problems on a wide range of social issues. Leech Lake Ojibwe Pat Bellanger and many other women attended the early Minneapolis forums organized in the summer of 1968. Once again, child welfare emerged as a significant area of work for AIM women because of pleas from parents whose children were being removed, and Bellanger received countless phone calls from members of the community families. She recalled that in the Twin Cities, Ramsey and Hennepin Counties “were taking Indian children from homes where they felt that the child wasn’t being educated, that they were being made a failure, and so they were put into white homes. And so the parents were panicking, saying, ‘My child is good, I have a good kid,’ yet Indians were not succeeding in mainstream public schools.”27
Vikki Howard was a Leech Lake teenager living in Minneapolis when she first learned about the American Indian Movement. During the takeover of Alcatraz, she and her public school classmates at North High School, who affiliated with AIM youth and called themselves TANS, for True American Native Students, coordinated a tour of “all the Indian boarding schools from Minnesota to southern California, to Alcatraz and back.” They reached Alcatraz toward the end of the occupation, and Howard returned to the Twin Cities to enter Macalester College, in St. Paul, during the year of Wounded Knee, the highly symbolic AIM takeover on the Pine Ridge Reservation, in South Dakota, in 1973, which focused national attention on Indian issues. Some of Howard’s friends went out to South Dakota while she “stayed focused” in college. The later trials at the federal building in St. Paul, during which AIM leaders were acquitted of wrongdoing during the takeover, and the formation of new, alternative “survival” schools in the Twin Cities, where part of the activist agenda would be fulfilled through the establishment of an indigenous-focused curriculum, left Howard feeling that there was “never a dull moment.”28 She recalled the event known as the Longest Walk, the 1978 journey from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., organized by activists to create greater awareness across the country of American Indian concerns.
As I grew into a young adult, in my twenties with the American Indian Movement, I went on the Longest Walk in 1978. . . . I ended up going out with the Minnesota team, the group that went from Minnesota AIM. The original AIM. Quite a few people from the community. I got to do work on some of the logistics and public relations, and designing pamphlets to educate people why the Longest Walk was happening. Through the movement I was exposed to my first Sun Dance and spirituality, different elders. All this came about as I started working at Heart of the Earth. And that’s when I began my journey to find my way and that’s where I found my way back to the Anishinaabe way of life.29
Howard spent ten years after college working at the Heart of the Earth Survival School in Minneapolis, innovating for her students in the seventh through twelfth grades curriculum in history and social studies in ways that included American Indian history and culture. She eventually became the elementary school’s principal. Heart of the Earth was one of two American Indian Movement survival schools formed in the Twin Cities in 1972. The other was the Red School House, in St. Paul, which closed in 1995 while Heart of the Earth continued until 2008. Ona Kingbird, Pat Bellanger, Vikki Howard, and many other Ojibwe women committed their skills, creativity, labor, and leadership to the education of urban Indian children through the survival schools, which outlived by many years the early symbolic and well-known AIM protests of the 1970s. The women’s decades-long work to create culturally and historically meaningful curricula outlasted the survival schools themselves and influenced a new generation of charter schools, language-immersion schools, and more mainstream institutions throughout Minnesota. Remembering her own coming-of-age with the American Indian Movement, Howard reflected, “It was a good time in history to be growing up in the Twin Cities American Indian community; it was like the renaissance of American Indian everything.”30
The generations born after the allotment of reservations, assimilation, and subsequent disruptive policies of the termination era were left to pick up the pieces, and they did not forget the experiences of their parents and grandparents. While many stayed in the Ojibwe homelands on reservations, others migrated to the cities of the Great Lakes region and forged a new pan-indigenous community in the urban landscape. Remarkably, Ojibwe culture and ethics of community life persisted in the aftermath of greater urbanization and still thrive in unexpected ways in cities like Minneapolis. Ignatia Broker, the World War Two defense worker and later a storyteller and author, described hardship but also fortitude, generosity, and a new kinship that crossed tribal lines, resulting in the distinctive urban Indian community that emerged in Minneapolis and other cities in the twentieth century.
Maybe it was a good thing, the migration of our people to the urban areas during the war years, because there, amongst the millions of people, we were brought to a brotherhood. We Indian people who worked in the war plants started a social group not only for the Ojibway but for the Dakota, the Arikara, the Menominee, the Gros Ventres, the Cree, the Oneida, and all those from other tribes and other states who had made the trek to something new.31
Scholars writing about the twentieth-century struggles of Indian people for greater tribal sovereignty have emphasized the historic nineteen-month takeover of Alcatraz that began on November 20, 1969, as a beginning benchmark for activism, yet Indian leaders and foundational organizations had certainly undertaken formative political efforts in the early postwar years through the 1960s and beyond. In taking this longer and broader view of Indian activism, the definition of meaningful action expands to include a variety of significant responsibilities through which people behaved in “politically purposeful ways.” Usually this means reconsidering the more mundane aspects of organized political action, like arranging community meetings, writing grants, coordinating youth programs, and testifying before local and state political bodies, in addition to militancy.32
Ojibwe women worked alongside men, within their communities, to take control of their own destinies. The women themselves remain outspoken yet humble and are likely to cite male leaders in the community for their ability to give good speeches or create political change. However, in the long view of the history of American Indian activism in Minneapolis, it is clear that women held the majority of sustained leadership roles in the community through their participation in the less sensational but no less important or visionary work of organizing new schools, Indian centers, curricula, social services, and legislation. Their body of work, especially new varieties of white-collar labor, is a breathtaking achievement that led to increased well-being for Indians in Minnesota and greater sovereignty for Indian people nationwide.33
Ojibwe women’s underlying commitment to values they learned from their mothers, grandmothers, and other significant figures in their lives remains a powerful influence. They are keenly aware of having inherited a responsibility from previous generations who weathered great hardships. Pat Bellanger expressed admiration for how boldly Ojibwe women “have been strong throughout everything” and insisted that “we have kept our ways.” Women including Bellanger have an appreciation for the historical role of women in Ojibwe society and the fact that some of the most important work that sustained community life, like harvesting wild rice, “has always gone through the women.”34 Like their Ojibwe grandmothers, they continue to work as women did in the wild rice economy—not only for material sustenance but for their own empowerment and the spiritual well-being of their family and community.