The Big Question

Picture the American city. You can see it and so can I: gleaming post-industrial buildings, businesspeople in suits, working-class people toiling in service jobs, de-industrialization galore. Now, picture Native Americans. Not as illustrations in history books, but alive on reservations, maybe even leading protests, out of sight but somewhere in the American hinterland. These images don’t fit together very well. For many, they are juxtaposed: The former represents the pinnacle of progress, the latter the periphery and past. Yet according to the Census Bureau seven in 10 Native Americans, or 3.7 million people, live in cities. Even among the budding Indigenous intelligentsia, there is often a disconnect between our everyday realities and the way we place and tell our stories.In 1952, the federal government established the Urban Indian Relocation Program, which pushed Native peoples to leave reservations for jobs in cities. The program was central to “Termination Era” policies from the 1940s–60s, which were designed to undermine tribal sovereignty, open Indigenous lands to capital investment, and assimilate Native people into the laboring classes. Many on this socially engineered diaspora relocated to Oakland, California, where I grew up. In 1955, they established the Intertribal Friendship House, one of the first urban Indian community centers in the country.Inspired by their brethren in the Chicano Movement and Black Panther Party, plus peoples’ revolutions sweeping the developing world, Indigenous urbanites led the iconic occupation of Alcatraz Island from 1969 to 1971, bringing unprecedented national attention to Native issues. Around the same time, a group of relocation Indians in Minneapolis, Minnesota, founded the American Indian Movement. Ironically, a policy designed to assimilate Indigenous people into the body politic instead brought them together to form new communities of solidarity and resistance, setting the stage for dramatic and influential political movements.Urban migration created tensions that continue to shape the Indigenous experience. Today, Indigenous people in the United States—like our relatives in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—are demographically urban. Yet our cultural identities and political struggles remain predominantly rural and tribal. This paradox has persisted from the 1973 standoff at Wounded Knee to the Dakota Access Pipeline protest at Standing Rock. The cultural and political Indigenous heartland is often distant from where most Indigenous people live. As urbanization accelerates, will frameworks of Indigenous self-determination, rights, and sovereignty urbanize as well? Or will Indigenous people living in cities continue to dream of distant homelands?From a policy perspective, the history of relocation is worth retelling—especially as Indigenous communities and progressive leaders work to address the enduring legacies and injustices of colonialism. Colonialism has been a devastating force of oppression across the globe. Yet, we should not overestimate colonial might and underestimate Indigenous resilience. Policies engineered to trigger Indigenous social death, like relocation, unwittingly instigated Indigenous rebirth. Human design cannot govern history and power. Those two twist and turn, writhe and ridicule in unpredictable ways. Perhaps the future of Indigenous resistance, resurgence, and renaissance will be equally curious.I am Amajagh, or “Tuareg” to outsiders. In my country in the center of the Sahara, we have always been nourished intellectually, spiritually, and politically by passing travelers, exchanging with them knowledge, goods, ideas, and cultures. Today, economic migrants come en masse from the greener countries of the Guinean Gulf, crossing the Sahara on the way to their El Dorado: Europe. Many must wait for transport opportunities in Agadez, Niger, before they can continue their journey. They do not interact with the population; they merely wish to reach their destination quickly, and they bargain only for what will help them achieve that aim.The migrants’ needs—for water, wood, grass to weave shelters, and foreign products—surpass the capacity of the desert, which demands the strict and parsimonious management of its meager resources. State officials profit from the situation, taxing the migrants who carry large amounts of money with them, and, in the process, they tax us as well. The price of food soars, impoverishing locals and enriching those who do not have to worry about the fragility of life in the desert, which demands temperance, rationality, and solidarity not only among men, but also between man and nature. Compared to the modesty of our means, it seems to us that the people who pass through have enough capital to launch business ventures at home, rather than spending their money on the journey. But I do not condemn men and women who think that a better world will be found elsewhere. My own poetic dream is to go and meet other worlds, other universes of thought, carrying my own cultural bundle to exchange with others.I feel uneasy about the shape this mass departure is taking. It conjures up an image of chaos: a horrible vision of Africa’s lands being bled of their inhabitants, a stampede of people about to be swallowed by the West for its bulimic consumption. For those of us who live in this arid country and who rank asceticism and the mastery of physical needs among our highest values, it hurts to watch people pass through with the sole objective of acquiring material goods, ignoring the poor lands they traverse and the rich cultures they encounter. We are worried that this attitude will contaminate our ways of resisting consumerism, our worldviews, and our capacity to see beyond the concrete horizon.There are few places that have been as deeply affected by rapid demographic change as East Turkestan, which was incorporated into the People’s Republic of China as the “Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region” in 1955. Since then, a state-sponsored influx of Han Chinese has altered the territory to the point that we Uyghurs have become marginalized in our own homeland.East Turkestan fell in and out of Chinese control in the 19th and 20th centuries, but for most of that time it did not have a large Han population. The Uyghurs, like other Central Asians, speak a Turkic language and practice Islam, which makes us ethnically and culturally distinct from the Chinese. In the 1950s, the Han made up only about 10 percent of the area’s population, but by 2010 the 22 million-person population was roughly 40 percent Han and 46 percent Uyghur.One of the first waves of Han migration into East Turkestan was facilitated by the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, a paramilitary agricultural organization started under Mao Zedong that established, and held jurisdiction over, Han settlements. Xinjiang functioned as a parallel authority in the region, tasked with promoting economic development. At the same time, the regional government also welcomed Han migration by making it easy for newcomers to register as locals (a process known as getting a hukou) regardless of education or skill level. Even today, Han are offered high wages if they move from northern cities to the Uyghur-dominated south to join the police or work as teachers. Eastern cities, by contrast, had and continue to have stricter education and income requirements for obtaining residency permits. It is difficult for Uyghurs to transfer their residential status to different cities in East Turkestan, let alone anywhere outside the region.This state-sponsored development has created discontent among members of the Uyghur population, as we are denied the benefits of and the proceeds derived from the resources of our homeland. Discrimination is also common: Uyghurs are excluded from the highest-paying jobs and the most powerful political offices, which are overwhelmingly held by Han. In order to make Han migrants and investors feel secure, the government is turning East Turkestan into a high-tech police state that singles out Uyghurs through police checkpoints, house searches, and arbitrary detainment in reeducation centers.The government also regularly undermines or directly attacks Uyghur language, religion, and rights. We face restrictions on freedom of speech, assembly, and movement that go well beyond those endured by Han. The Chinese state sees expressions of Uyghur identity as potentially subversive and separatist, and connected to religious extremism and violence. Their solution is to increase the pace of assimilationist policies, such as eliminating the use of the Uyghur language in so-called bilingual schools, which now operate only in Mandarin; deciding who is allowed to worship at state-approved mosques; and confiscating copies of the Quran and other religious items. These policies are intended to repress Uyghur identity, as well as cultivate suspicion within the Uyghur community and between us and other ethnic groups. But there is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of China’s policies: By singling out Uyghurs and labeling us as threats, the state further alienates us from our Han neighbors. This undermines the government’s claim that we are part of the Chinese nation, equal to the Han. The state cannot simultaneously assimilate and discriminate against Uyghurs. This is why, I believe, its policies are doomed to fail.

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