![]() In the 1930s, these boarding schools began closing after an independent evaluation revealed that students were malnourished and living in poor, overcrowded conditions. Marr, an anthropologist and a librarian at Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry, the schools sought to “ eradicate all vestiges of their tribal cultures.” Later that century, there was a movement to “civilize,” or assimilate, Native Americans, and the Bureau created federal boarding schools, where Native American children were separated from their parents and only allowed to speak English and play sports that had European origins. Two early such policies were the forced relocation of Native Americans to reservations and the creation, in 1824, of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The group was working to undo hundreds of years of federal policy that has played a role in producing modern-day Native American poverty. Among other achievements, it pressured the federal government to restore tribal recognition and sovereignty. In the 1970s, Minneapolis became the headquarters of the national American Indian Movement, a civil-rights group. Here, the Native American community has taken some bold steps to aid integration, such as opening public schools tailored to Native American students’ needs and maintaining the country’s only federally subsidized housing project for Native Americans. Minneapolis was one of the first cities chosen for the federal relocation program. Though the federal government paid for relocation expenses to the cities, and provided some vocational training, urban Native Americans faced high levels of job discrimination, and few opportunities for job advancement. Though the act didn’t force people to leave their reservations, it made it hard for families to stay by dissolving federal recognition of most tribes, and ending federal funding for reservations’ schools, hospitals, and basic services-along with the jobs they created. ![]() The Indian Relocation Act of 1956 was the impetus for the relocation of the large number of Native Americans now living in urban areas. ![]() Most Native Americans now live in cities, where many are still trying to adjust to urban life as a group, Native Americans face a 27 percent poverty rate and are still trying to reverse some of the lasting effects of federal policies that have put them at a disadvantage for hundreds of years. MINNEAPOLIS, Minn.-Native American poverty doesn’t fit the image many may have of life on secluded, depleted reservations.
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