Introduction

Overview During the 1970s (the years of my graduate work in anthropology and most intensive period of involvement with the Los Angeles, California, Native American community) ethnology and its project, cross-cultural comparison as the means by which anthropologists could build and sustain general models of social and cultural evolution, were definitely considered passé, conceptually challenged, crude, artifactual paradigms of a disciplinary beginning that most established anthropologists, at the time, would sooner have forgotten.1 Thirty years later, it is now time to revive or, at the very least, revision cross-cultural, comparative analysis as a possible and productive pathway to more holistic understandings of the continuing pan-continental rural and/or reservation to urban migrations of North American Indians. The ethnohistoric information provided by the seven articles in this special issue of American Indian Quarterly certainly lend themselves to comparative and cross-cultural discourse. Parallels across the seven discrete urban Native American communities (whether in Canada or the United States, the initiating and "front stage" personae in the 1950s and 1960s were, predominately, men) make one wonder if male dominance of the political arena is, in fact, a cross-cultural given and, if so, why?2 Perhaps male dominance of the political space is a pan-cultural, sociopolitical phenomenon that is the product of First World cultural colonialism of the Third and Fourth Worlds.3 Or is the strongest contributing factor and explanatory model to overwhelming male hegemony in public arenas to be found in an understanding of gender relations across [End Page 491] time and space? And, if so, is that paradigm an Indigenous or extra-cultural imposition? Education (either getting one's own or ensuring that other women and/or succeeding generations of daughters and nieces are presented with the opportunity to get theirs) is a central theme in most of the women's "success" stories described in the following seven articles. Education as a pathway to self-improvement and upward social and economic mobility is also a second example of a historical process that, obviously, should be understood as a cross-cultural and not an ethnic, nor, necessarily, a gender-specific social phenomenon. In fact, most first generation immigrants to the United States and Canada understand that gaining an American education, if not for themselves, then, certainly, for their children, is not only a privilege but also a necessity. Why it was that Native American women as opposed to Native American men, at least since the 1970s, would be over-represented in colleges and universities is one more area in which further research is mandated. Keeping the Campfires Going elicits as many questions as it answers. All of the authors, I feel sure, would agree with me when I assert that the work of documenting, interpreting, and understanding Native American women's urban experiences has just begun. This collection of essays provides succeeding generations of ethnohistorians, ethnopolitical scientists, ethnographers, and Indigenous researchers with a number of perspectives and interpretations of ethnohistoric phenomena on which to base their own revisioning of the urban Indian experience to date and to be lived. The editors of Keeping the Campfires Going are to be commended for their inclusion in this special issue of American Indian Quarterly, which has as its theme urban relocation of Native peoples and Native American women in particular, not only articles about the phenomenon in the United States but also three articles about the urban experience of a number of people from Canada's First Nations. Given the predominance of research regarding the pros and cons, demographic outcomes and the relative "successes" and "failures" of the United States' Urban Indian Relocation Program, it could be easily assumed that urban relocation of Native Peoples is a U.S.-specific ethnohistoric phenomenon.4 Certainly the concerted effort to encourage Native Americans to move off-reservation, which was federally mandated and funded in 1953, dramatically altered the demographic and political Native American landscape in the [End Page 492] following twenty years of its implementation and existence as federal policy.5 Contemporarily...

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