PhD student Nancy Lucero has found that American Indians often feel invisible among the ethnic groups living in cities. So she's helping social workers and others recognize that American Indian culture exists in urban areas.
Even though roughly 30,000 American Indians live in the Denver area, Lucero often has social workers telling her, "I don't encounter Native people in my work."
Lucero, a Choctaw, was born and raised in Denver. She's spent her career as a counselor and therapist for urban American Indians. After years of seeing cultural misunderstandings between Native people and non-Indian service providers, she decided to get her doctorate to help fix the gap.
Relocation to cities
The U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs started moving American Indians to cities in 1952 through its Voluntary Relocation Program. The program, Lucero explains, brought more than 150,000 American Indians from reservations to cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and Denver over two decades. Today 67 percent of American Indians live in urban areas.
For her dissertation, Lucero is studying the ways that the Relocation Program and living in cities have affected urban Indians' cultural identities.
Maintaining culture in the urban world
Lucero is interviewing relocated Indians and the generations of their families who've stayed in Denver. She's asking them how they understand their American Indian identity, how they maintain connections to their tribes and how living in an urban area has affected their families over three or four generations.
A lot of questions surround the identities of urban Indians. In particular, Lucero says, it's often assumed that Indians living in cities have had to assimilate and have lost connections to their culture.
An opportunity for change
Lucero sees the Relocation Program not as flatly destructive, but as a process that brought about adaption and development. "The relocation process, and its subsequent manifestation as urbanization, has not been adequately studied as an element in a dynamic process of cultural growth, evolution and change," she explains. Relocatees' culture wasn't left on the reservation, she argues, but has stayed with them regardless of where they live.
When social workers better understand urban American Indians, Lucero says, they'll communicate more effectively and develop a better rapport with their clients.
