Guest Blog From Jackie – Day of Conception

Ani’s day of conception took place in Chicago, in the early spring of 1966.

The story that I tell now I learned mostly from Ani’s birth father when I met him for the first time in 2002, and from Ani’s birth Aunts and Uncles, and from history books that tell the story of the Indian Relocation Movement in the 1950’s and 1960’s. During that time, people came to the reservations and told wonderful stories and showed pamphlets about life in the Cities for Indians. The pamphlets said that people would be taken care of and they would get wonderful jobs and make lots of money, and that life would be better in the City than on the Reservation. For many reasons, Ani’s family was a prime target for these ads. They were intelligent and ambitious people, and the eldest family male had for generations left the family at an early age to explore the world. And they were not afraid to try new things. Ani’s father said that his family was the first one to have a radio and that they always had a car when he was growing up – in the 30’s and 40’s, when most others did not.
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(what follows is quoted from PBS.org)

In 1950, the average Native American on a reservation earned $950. The average black person earned $2,000, and the average white person earned almost $4,000 — over four times more than Indians.
So, in 1952, the federal government initiated the Urban Indian Relocation Program. It was designed to entice reservation dwellers to seven major urban cities where the jobs supposedly were plentiful.
Relocation offices were set up in Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Cleveland and Dallas. Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) employees were supposed to orient new arrivals and manage financial and job training programs for them. Other BIA officials recruited prospective "Relocatees" from many of the reservations around the country. ….
Relocatees were supposed to receive temporary housing, counseling and guidance in finding a job, permanent housing, community and social resources. The new migrants also were given money to tide them over on a sliding scale based on the number of children in the family. A man, his wife and four children got $80 a week for four weeks.
That's what they were promised. Some found that the promises were not kept. Not every relocatee found a job, and those that did were generally at the lower end of the economic ladder. Others succumbed to alcohol and those who were accustomed to drinking in public on their home reservations got into trouble with the law when they drank on city streets. Many more were simply homesick so far away from their families and familiar landscapes.
Still more decided to return to their reservation. But over the years, it's estimated that as many as 750,000 Native Americans migrated to the cities between 1950 and 1980. Some came through the Relocation Program. Others came on their own.
Those who stayed eventually found other Indians although they usually were members of another tribe. By now inter-tribal marriages created a new generation of Indians who's identity was split between two or more tribes. But still more came.
In the 2000 Census, 79 percent of all Americans were living in cities.
For American Indians, the urban population had risen to 64 percent — a huge increase over the 1940 urban population of 8 percent.
While Indians still lagged behind non-Indians in economic power, in the 1960s urban Indians found a new political activism. They developed a sense of identity that was less tied to the reservation or tribe and more connected to the vast array of tribes in the cities.
2006 Native American Public Telecommunications
http://www.pbs.org/indiancountry/history/relocate.html
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So Ani’s father went to Chicago, and so did Ani’s Aunt May, Aunt Betty, Aunt Yolanda, and Uncle Mike. In Chicago they looked for jobs, and socialized with other Indians, and became politically active in AIM for a time. A lot of this socializing went on in bars on Chicago’s near north side - Clark Street. It was in a bar that Ani’s father met Ani’s mother, who was from a different reservation and a different tribe. But in Chicago this didn’t matter so much as being Indian was what drew people together.

Ani’s mother, Betty Pierce, came to Chicago from the Menomonee Reservation in Wisconsin in 1966. At first Betty stayed with her sister Shirley and her husband who had come to Chicago to find jobs in 1959. Betty soon started hanging out on Clark Street, which her sister Shirley referred to as "ghetto," and Ben's sister referred to as "skid row." But that was where the action was, even if some of it was on the rough side. That was where you could meet people and that is where Betty Pierce from the Menomonee Reservation met Ben Chosa from Lac du Flambeau. Before long they were living together and about 9 months later Ani - or "Baby Ben" as he was called then - was born.

Ani didn’t know any of this story or who his parents were until a few years ago when he met his father for the first time in 35 years, after losing him at age 7 months. Ani never saw his mother again after he lost her, too, along with his father. By the time we found his father in 2002, his mother had died.