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US Termination Policy and the Indian Urban Relocation Program

c. 1952–1973 · Americas

Displacement

Displaced

100,000

About 100,000 Native Americans were moved to urban centres by the BIA-sponsored relocation program between 1952 and 1973 (Encyclopedia of the Great Plains); the National Archives records the program growing from about 2,600 job placements in fiscal 1953 to over 6,900 in fiscal 1957.

Share of the population affected

18%

of the American Indian and Alaska Native population of the United States at the 1960 census, 1960

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What happened

From 1952 the Bureau of Indian Affairs ran a relocation program that paid one-way travel and short-term support for Native Americans who left reservations for designated cities including Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, Dallas, Seattle, Minneapolis and Salt Lake City; the Encyclopedia of the Great Plains estimates about 100,000 people moved by 1973. The program was formalised by the Indian Relocation Act of 1956 and ran alongside congressional 'termination', which ended federal recognition and trust protection for more than a hundred tribes and dissolved reservation land bases. Participation was nominally voluntary, but it was promoted amid deliberate withdrawal of reservation services and employment, and the National Archives records that because the BIA funded only outbound travel, people who could not find work were often unable to return. Relocatees encountered discrimination, low-wage work and loss of kin and ceremonial ties; the resulting urban Indian communities also produced new political organisation, including the founding of the American Indian Movement in Minneapolis in 1968. The policy was repudiated in the 1970s by the shift to self-determination, and several terminated tribes were later restored. Destination breakdowns above are approximate: the BIA reported annual placements rather than a full city-by-city census.

Parties

The US Bureau of Indian Affairs moved Native Americans from reservations to designated cities while Congress terminated federal recognition of scores of tribes

Disputed

Historians disagree over how coercive the program was, with some scholars (notably Douglas Miller) arguing that Native people used relocation strategically as migration rather than simply submitting to it, while tribal and activist accounts describe it as an assimilationist removal that emptied reservations by design.

The denominator

The 1960 census counted 551,669 American Indians and Alaska Natives, up from 357,499 in 1950; both counts rest on self-identification and enumeration on reservations and are generally regarded as undercounts. Termination itself ended federal recognition for more than 100 tribes and bands with roughly 12,000 enrolled members.

The affected figure counts participations in the relocation programme over two decades rather than distinct individuals; a large share of participants returned to their reservations, and some relocated more than once.

Where the baseline comes from

Native Americans in the United States — Wikipediaopen-edited
Indian termination policy — Wikipediaopen-edited

On the death toll

There was no significant death toll attributable to relocation itself. No inquiry has attempted to quantify deaths, and the harms recorded by the National Archives and by tribal accounts are poverty, unemployment, discrimination, alcohol-related illness and separation from family rather than killing or deaths in transit.