Native Students at Work by Kevin Whalen

Author:Kevin Whalen [Whalen, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, American, Native American Studies, Education, History, United States, State & Local, West (AK; CA; CO; HI; ID; MT; NV; UT; WY)
ISBN: 9780295806662
Google: t6_8CwAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: 2016-08-25T05:47:41+00:00

CHAPTER 4

Indians “Should Not Go There”

The Great Depression and the End of Outing

IN JANUARY 1931, SUPERVISOR OF INDIAN EDUCATION CARL MOORE described a nearly hopeless situation at the Midnight Mission, one of the largest homeless shelters in Los Angeles. Moore reported that the Mission, located in the heart of Skid Row, received six hundred to seven hundred visitors each day. On this day, hundreds of men waited in a line that stretched down San Pedro Avenue and nearly out of sight. At least a few, observed Moore, would likely be Native. “An average of thirty boys and men apply here monthly for help in finding employment,” he wrote. “A considerable number of these are boys from our schools.”1 Like the rest of the country, Southern California had become mired in economic depression. The region’s many Native people, including those in Los Angeles, were not immune.

Despite the economic downturn, the outing center continued to serve as a crucial resource for Native people in Los Angeles, placing hundreds into increasingly scarce jobs during the early years of the Depression. Yet political forces more powerful than economics and job placement rates would determine the fate of the city’s outing program. As Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office, he brought with him the charismatic John Collier as his commissioner of Indian affairs. While Collier had long crusaded for the rights of indigenous peoples, he clung to deeply romanticized views of their communities. Indians, he argued, belonged on reservations, where they could shine the light of their collectivist cultures onto the greed and depravity of the industrial, capitalist order of U.S. culture. Impervious to the good that Native people found in outing, Collier ordered the outing center closed in 1933.

As the federal government abandoned efforts to “uplift” Indians through living and working in the city, indigenous communities continued their efforts to make the Office of Indian Affairs more responsive to their needs. Native people had become experts in dealing with federal schemes established in hopes of controlling, improving, and erasing them. Many communities adjusted quickly to the policy changes of the 1930s by taking advantage of New Deal programs that focused on providing on-reservation employment. But not all Native people accepted the notion that they should no longer venture into urban areas. A small but influential cadre of boarding school graduates presented the federal government with a new idea: Send us to college.

The stories of Native people who navigated the transition away from outing labor and toward federal support for their higher education shed light on a yet underexplored element of federal Indian policy. Moreover, they highlight the continuing efforts of Native people to gain what they could from the federal government. As policies shifted, indigenous communities creatively adapted their tactics in the seemingly never-ending struggle to draw benefits from a colonial apparatus that paid little attention to their desires. Just as their predecessors did with outing programs, Native people who accessed federal support for higher education combined migration and knowledge of complex federal bureaucracies in order to chart modern and distinctly indigenous paths into the second half of the twentieth century.

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