Just as travel literature offers contradictory social fictions of identity and difference, state policies write "foundational fictions" of citizenship and exclusion. Such policies, in turn, compel subject populations to travel: to move their residences on a temporary or permanent basis; to commute to sources of employment or social welfare benefits; and to return "home" to renew social and cultural ties. In the 1950s and 1960s, operating under a rubric of anti-communalism and "full civil rights," the Bureau of Indian Affairs implemented policies of Termination and Relocation, compelling Native Americans to leave reservations established by treaty in the 19th century, and move to cities, where they could, presumably, become "real Americans."
Drawing on Congressional debates as well as the archives of the local, state and federal institutions that prepared to usher Indians into cities like Minneapolis, this paper analyzes the ways that nationalist ideology attempted to write Indians into the dominant imaginings of U.S. life during the postwar period. Although Indian citizenship had been legally guaranteed as of 1924, it was rediscovered as a compelling cold war narrative during the 1940s and 1950s by policy makers as well as by some Indian organizations seeking reform. Predicated on modernist notions of assimilation, the federal Relocation program brought Indians into U.S. cities, recruiting "volunteers" from reservations with skyrocketing rates of unemployment and poverty.
I argue that the rhetoric of policy has its own poetics, and that the citizens, reformers, and subjects of such policy need to listen for the ways it writes a story that make sense to the nation. This is crucial, both for understanding both the period in question and the complex responses of Indian people to programs designed to assimilate them, and to "terminate" the status of Indians as dual citizens of both indigenous and modernist nations.
Recent scholarship on travel writing by James Clifford, Caren Kaplan, Mary Louise Pratt and others points out that it is crucial that we examine the metaphors that separate scholarly consideration of travel, exile, and migration. Modernist conceptions of travel have often relied on fixed conceptions of position that are contradicted by the narratives of those at the borders of the nation-state. In this paper, I argue that the nation-state itself has been the source of compulsory relocation for Native Americans throughout U.S. history; the fictions authored by federal policies, then, become narratives of compulsory travel.
"The world is made up of stories, not atoms." Muriel Ruekeyser, 1968
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