Young Indian men boarding a train as part of the Urban Indian
Relocation Program. The Urban Relocation Program In the last
half of the 20th Century, a government program that was little
known at the time and is largely forgotten today created the
largest movement of Indians in American history. The final scope
and meaning of this massive social experiment is still impacting
native peoples today. World War II changed American society and
profoundly affected the lives of Native Americans. The U.S. was
becoming much more urban: The Relocation Program did provide
some Indians better jobs, at the price of being cut off from
tribal roots. Government policy all through the 1700s and 1800s
had been designed to make Indians into "yeomen farmers." The
lawmakers who wrote these policies were forgetting that the
first European settlers would have starved without the
benevolent help of native farmers. They also were forgetting
that indigenous plant breeders gave the world corn, beans,
squash, pumpkins, tomatoes, potatoes,