A Modern Life
After decades of discrimination, poverty, and despair, American Indians can finally look toward a better future
In the city. Chicago is home to 30,000 of them. "People really started coming in the 1950s," says Joe Podlasek, executive director of the American Indian Center of Chicago. The federal government at the time was actively "terminating" tribes--stripping more than 100 groups of their official status in an attempt to force assimilation--and encouraging reservation inhabitants to move to cities with ads featuring photos of shiny modern homes and, says Podlasek, "a bus ticket, a few bucks in your pocket, and not much else."
Like other Americans, Indians have continued to move to the cities ever since, for education, excitement, and what is perhaps most lacking on reservations, good jobs. The transition from rural to urban life is never easy, but Native Americans often face the additional challenges of discrimination, lack of education, and cultural acclimation. Even simple gestures can be a problem; many Native Americans feel looking someone in the eye is rude; their downcast glances can appear evasive or dishonest.
Centers like the AIC, founded as a self-help agency in 1953, can ease the way. Housed in a ramshackle building in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood, the warren of offices, assembly halls, a food bank, and used clothing depot offers programs and cultural events for a community of Native Americans from more than 100 tribes. "We're growing by leaps and bounds," says Podlasek, who is of mixed Polish and Ojibwe ancestry, "using wisdom from the elders and energy from our young staff." That includes Megan Bang, 28, an Ojibwe teacher and Ph.D. candidate, who runs an after-school program called Positive Paths. The program combines tutoring, leadership training, and cultural activities, and, says Bang, gives students who are often the only Native Americans in their classes "a place to be a kid first."
Indian schools were long a tool of assimilation, forbidding children to speak their native languages and forcing boys to cut off their braids, so it's not surprising that many Native Americans have an uncomfortable relationship with the education system. On reservations, many tribes are improving historically abysmal graduation rates by running their own schools, offering classes and teaching methods tailored to Native American needs. In the cities, says Bang, "Indian kids test really well for their first four years, but then they seem to just disappear." She cites one 8-year-old who was asked by his teacher what "herd" he belonged to. "A lot of our kids hold and internalize what they hear instead of turning it around," says Bang.
Mary Anne Armstrong, the AIC's bookkeeper and executive secretary, moved to Chicago from the Lac du Flambeau reservation in Wisconsin as a child and dropped out of high school at age 16. "I wanted to be with my community," she recalls, "where I could be accepted and not looked down on." But like many Indian students, she returned to school later in life, completing a bachelor's degree at 40. (The average age of Native American college students is 33, says Bang.) Even for the most successful, like AIC Program Director Nizhoni Hodge, who graduated from Stanford in 2002, the college experience can be challenging. Beyond the slights of cartoonish "Indian" mascots, the Native American students who make it to top schools, says the Navajo/Cherokee Hodge, "are the top of their communities and the hope of a lot of people, so it can be very hard to accept that you're having problems. Too many feel uncomfortable asking for help, even with academics."
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