Struggles for the land and the city: Settler colonialism, anticolonialism, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs Urban Relocation Program in Chicago

The Bureau of Indian Affairs Urban Relocation program relocated thousands of Native Americans to Chicago and other cities from the early 1950s through the early 1970s. Despite BIA claims of social and economic progress, Native people faced exploitative social, political, and material conditions in the city. This article examines how the BIA envisioned and managed relocation in Chicago and how Native people challenged the BIA’s expectations and desires. Urban sociological and urban historical literature on the postwar U.S. is not well positioned to answer these questions, given its minimal engagement with histories of U.S. settler colonialism and urban Indigenous experiences. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives on settler colonial urbanisms and urban indigeneity, I uncover how the BIA imagined Chicago as a modern city disconnected from indigeneity, and how relocated Native people formed the Chicago Indian Village movement to fight for land back while building space and community in resistance to dispossession.