Toward a Native Archive: Chicago’s Relocation Photos, Indian Labor, and Indigenous Public Text

Abstract:This article is an encounter with a governmentally organized archive, one that underscores how photo and text together describe emerging communities and alternative forms of belonging. Between 1953 and 1957 the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) began what it called the “relocation project,” which moved American Indians from rural reservations to major American urban centers. The BIA maintained an archive of photographs of relocatees both before and after relocation and produced pamphlets, internal documents, newsletters, and other bureaucratic material. This article illustrates how a literary historical reading of these images enables new claims on urban American Indian belonging in the United States in the early 1950s. It contextualizes American Indian relocation as an institutionalized but also surprisingly aestheticized endeavor. The project explores an aesthetics of the ordinary that demands rethinking the work of photography in the twentieth century and contributes to ongoing conversations in the construction of Native archives.