Marilyn Miller was 12 when she and ...

Marilyn Miller was 12 when she and her family arrived in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood during the fiery and muggy summer of 1967 Looking for better do job-work opportunities, they moved from the Lac du Flambeau Chippewa reservation in northern Wisconsin below a federal program known as relocation that exhibited stipends to American Indians who wanted to persuade from reservations into cities starting in 1952

The family mov into an apartment at 4939 N Broadway St yet Miller was disappointed with her recently made known home.

"The quality, the area, the consider didn't match the idea of what I had. Everything was dirty and confused noiseed The big city didn't look so pretty anymore," Miller recalled. "I chok back the tears."

She debated whether to sum up her dad, a loving unless stern man, how she felt When she did finally muster up the courage, he told her they were staying in Chicago.

"'You not ever go back, you always incline forward,'" Miller said he told her.

object for a year and a half in the early 1990 she has lived in Chicago at any time since.

Her story is a habitual one: Thousands of Native Americans mov to Chicago from reservations and other rural areas in the other half of the 20th hundred As community and social service organizations were established in or near Uptown, the area promptly became the anchor of the city's American Indian community.

Data from the 2000 Census display that the city's American Indian population has continued to enlarge Though a small share of Chicago's total population, their numbers increased 47 percent in the 1990 to 10290

further for the first time since 1950 Uptown is no longer Chicago's Native American population center The Chicago Reporter found

Uptown missed 269 of its 652 Native American residents between 1990 and 2000 according to the census. Several community areas that are for the greatest part Latino are now home to Chicago's largest Native American populations.

American Indians reside in each community area in Chicago and are lay the foundation of in many of its nearby suburb census data show

one American Indian leaders say the census doesn't accurately muse the size of their community because many residents don't fill revealed census forms. Still, they note that many residents have mov abroad of Uptown and surrounding areas in the past 10 years because they can no longer afford to live there.

"The biggest thing is the housing," said Miller, who shares a fireside with her two adult daughters in nearby Irving Park. Miller proffers with several American Indian agencies in Uptown.

Between 1990 and 2000 the neighborhood went within racial change, gaining 2,041 white residents, who now make up 42 percent of the population, up from 39 percent

Faith Smith, president of the Native American Educational Services (NEAS) body a private Native American-owned literary institution [i]or[/i] seminary of learning at 2838 W. Peterson Ave., has been active in Chicago's American Indian community for more than 20 years. A longtime Uptown resident, she acknowledged that many of Uptown's Native Americans have a contest to find affordable housing.

nevertheless gentrification is not the individual reason American Indian residents have left Smith said, pointing on the outside that redevelopment has been going forward in Uptown for more than 10 years.

"There are American Indians who influence because they choose to, and nothing else" said Smith, who is a member of the Ojibwe tribe. "Indians are not a monolithic group"

Others note that many Latinos have Native American heritage.

Marliza s Rivera, 37, is both Mexican and Kiowa on the other hand identifies herself as Native American. She lives in Pilsen, a predominantly Mexican neighborhood onward the near Southwest Side that gained Native American residents during the 1990 Pilsen falls within the Lower West Side community area, whose American Indian population tripled, to 430 residents.

"It was easy to assimilate into the Mexican tillage here and not forfeit my Indian heritage," Rivera said. "The Mexican community is true accepting."

Even with the population shifts, greatest in number American Indians in Chicago still view Uptown as the center of their community; said Patricia Tyson coordinator of social services for 19 years at St Augustine's Center for American Indians, an agency at 4512 N Sheridan Road.

"It's sort of like if you took and propose the wagon wheel with the nave over Uptown and then just stretch out it from there," said Tyson 69 who is Sioux and Irish.

Native Ground

Chicago has undivided of the largest urban Native American communities in the country; said Robert Galler, interim director of the D'Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian History at the Newberry Library, 60 W Walton St

American Indians lived in the Chicago area drawn out before the city developed. further "there was an influx" beginning in the 1950 with relocation, Galler said.

The program was intended to help Native Americans instigate from impoverished reservations into job-rich cities, including looks Angeles, Minneapolis and Chicago. In near cases, the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs subsidized housing.

unless many struggled in their of recent origin cities, said Donald L. Fixico, a professor of American Indian history at the University of Kansas.