American Indian Culture and Research Journal

INTRODUCTION Established in 1935, the Los Angeles County-based Indian Centers, Inc. (ICI) had provided a number of federally funded social services to the Native American residents of the Los Angeles Basin since the Johnson administration initiated its War on Poverty programs in the late 1960s. By the mid-1970s ICI consisted of a headquarters in downtown Los Angeles and satellite offices in Huntington Beach, Culver City, and San Gabriel Valley. It was described in 1977 as “the most widely known Indian institution in Los Angeles” and as having “existed longer and [being] more of a focal point of sentiment among [Los Angeles] Indians than any other Indian organization, past or present.” Los Angeles was already a venerable institution in 1967 when the founding families of the Orange County Indian Center (OCIC) began to store their collections of food and clothing for distribution among “our less fortunate Indian friends and neighbors in Orange County” in and from John and Louis Knifechief’s Stanton, California garage. While both ICI and OCIC had begun to receive federal employment and training funds and other federal social service grants at about the same time (1968-69), the Los Angeles-based organization had always been the more heavily and diversely funded. U.S. census figures certainly influenced the initial and unequal allocation of funds to these agencies. The 1960 census count indicates that eight times as many Native Americans lived in Los Angeles County as in Orange County—a difference that, although reduced to a four-to-one ratio by 1990 continues to characterize the proportion of Native American residents in each county.