Indians on the Move

“By carefully recounting life stories of some of those who migrated, the author suggests that there was another side to the story of American Indian urbanization. . . . Miller’s work is a model study on how to do research and write Native American history and is essential reading on twentieth-century Native America.”—American Indian Quarterly

“A significant contribution. . . . Indians on the Move does not provide an autopsy of VRP’s failure. It tells the bigger story of Native Americans responding to VRP in ways that continue to strengthen their communities.”—Journal of American History

“An illuminating history. . . . Miller does not retell the history of the Voluntary Relocation Program, but rather expands it outward and inward to account for Native American agency as an important and driving force under settler colonialism. The book is a worthwhile contribution to indigenous studies, migration studies, and American studies because it reconsiders history through the experiences of the humans who lived it and not just the systems that created it.”—H-Migration

“A fresh and fascinating book written in an accessible style that will be of interest for anyone interested in Native American culture, history, and research . . . . Indians on the Move shows that searches for employment and socioeconomic upward mobility were part of a larger story of Native American off-reservation migration.”—American Indian Culture and Research Journal

“Miller flips the script, demonstrating how Native people often negotiated how relocation would impact their lives on their terms. . . . Indians on the Move is a needed contribution to the fields of Indigenous studies, mobility studies, and urban history. . . . It not only tells a wonderful history but also projects the future—one that is urban and Indigenous.”—NAIS

“Using unique source materials and an agency-focused approach, this book generates a flexible, nuanced account of Native mobility and individual efforts toward maintaining practices of 'cosmopolitanism' that have always shaped indigenous cultures and histories.”—CHOICE

“Captures the humanity of indigenous determination to construct a duality that blended American Indian and Anglo-American culture while navigating the relocation program.”—The Chronicles of Oklahoma

“In urban migration, Miller finds a creative process whereby Native people brought tribal and non-Indian spaces into dialogue with one another, and he suggests that this process forms a key source of Native resilience in contemporary America. This insight alters our understanding of the relocation\x0bpolicy, and it is applicable to many other aspects of modern Native history.”—Ethnohistory

“Miller’s impressively researched new history of Native urban migration privileges Indigenous experience that can’t be reduced to the vagaries of federal Indian policy.” —Colleen O’Neill, Utah State University

“This book represents a paradigm shift on how we understand Native mobility and spatiality within the field of American Indian and Indigenous studies.” —Daniel M. Cobb, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill