American Indian Culture and Research Journal

When Chicago’s American Indian Center opened in 1953, it had a small core of dedicated leaders, but little support in the city. The Center’s board of directors had applied for funding to Chicago’s Metropolitan Welfare Council, the main clearinghouse of philanthropic funding in the city, only to be told that the Center’s existence was “contrary to our way of thinking.” It was not the first time that Native Americans seeking to create urban organizations had encountered rejection. For years, local Native American activists had found that urban Indians and Native American urban organizations were contrary to the way of thinking of many people in the city. What follows is a narrative history of activities which led to the American Indian Center’s creation, reconstructed from archival sources and expanding upon existing accounts of Chicago’s American Indian Center by Merwyn Garbarino and Janusz Mucha. It is intended as a counterpoint to the tendency of even recent scholarly work to use external forces to understand and explain urban Indian life. We tend to focus on the effects of life in the city upon Native Americans, rather than on the active way some Native Americans have attempted to effect changes in their urban life. In Chicago, as an example, archival documents show that Native American activists both instigated and sustained the struggle to create Native American organizations. They proposed such organizations as innovative solutions to the problems they perceived in urban life years before anyone else in Chicago recognized any need for such organizations. The following narrative demonstrates that in the years between 1946 and 1953 Native Americans in Chicago began to reshape local “ways of thinking” about Native American urban life and urban organizations.