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More than 50% of all American Indian people in the U.S. today live off-reservation, mostly in towns and cities. In addition, more than 50% of all Indians are married to non-Indians, meaning that the majority of Indians today are, and in the future will be, mixed bloods. By these measures, I am the typical American Indian, raised in suburban and urban areas, with one Indian parent and one non-Indian.

This flies in the face of resistant stereotypes of Indian people as full-bloods, living on remote and isolated reservations. My experience as an Indian in the city is not the same as that of a Native person in his or her own home community. My experience does, however, point out the variety and complexity of Indian life today.

Urban life has its own set of challenges, not the least of which is maintaining your traditions. To remain an Indian person in the city requires special attention to heritage and culture. It's not like being on a reservation where you are surrounded by your homeland, your relatives, your ceremonies, your tribal government and all the things that made up your particular culture. In the city, you must consciously reaffirm identity and tradition, seeking out other Native people and activities, Urban Indian organizations have formed in recent decades to meet the cultural and social needs of the growing Native population in cities.

My own history is illustrative of some of the experience of urban Indian people. I was born in Michigan; my father is Cherokee from the Western Nation of Oklahoma. He came to Michigan after service in World War II to find work, part of a trend among Indian people at the time throughout the U.S. He met and married my mother, a non-Indian, in Detroit. They moved, a couple of years later, to a small town near Flint, where we didn't know of any other Indian families. In that setting it was difficult to keep family and tribal ties alive, although we went back to Oklahoma often to see relatives. My father saw to it that we knew about Cherokee history and people, taking us to the national capital in Tahlequah, and to the Eastern Nation in Cherokee, N.C. so we could know our original homeland.

He was sure we were proud of who we were, coming to our schools to talk to other students about being Indian. We were largely isolated, however in a tribal community and interacting on a daily basis with other Cherokee people. It wasn't until later that I even realized that many things he did, and many values he taught us, were part of his Cherokee culture.

My father also taught me to value both parts of my heritage, Indian and non-Indian. He often told his children that we had an advantage, being of two worlds, because we could choose the best from each of them.

I was in graduate school doing my doctorate in anthropology before I had the chance to live and work in a substantial Indian community, in this case Milwaukee. About 8,000 Indians live in the city, and the first people I got to know in Milwaukee were other Indian students at the university, and then their families and friends. One of the people I met was a Mohawk woman about my age, who also grew up in Michigan, near Flint, just a few miles from where I grew up. We lamented the fact that we never had an Indian center to go to where we might have met and became friends and supporters. At about the time we were both going off to college, in the early 1970's, an Indian population in the city and surrounding suburbs. Today my family takes part in the center's activities, providing a connection with Native people that was missing when I was growing up in that community.

Five years ago, I moved to Rochester to teach anthropology at Nazareth College and to direct a new Multicultural Studies program. At the time, I didn't know if there would be an Indian community here, although I did know there were several reservations nearby. I went to a powwow at the Cattaraugus Reservation, and there saw a membership table set up by the Native American Cultural Center of Rochester. This was my introduction to the Rochester Indian community.

Rochester has a population of about 2,500 Indian people in the metropolitan area, and nearly all of them are members of one of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) nations---Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk or Tuscarora. This makes for a tightly knit group whose concerns often focus on Hanudenosaunee issues. Those of us from other Native nations don't always have the same concerns, but we all share the desire to remain Indian people, even away from our original homelands.

As an anthropologist, it is my job to observe and describe cultures. I have chosen to work primarily in my own culture, in urban Indian communities, to broaden the picture of American Indian life today. We are part of the urban Indian communities, we are part of the urban landscape, but we are part of older cultures, too.

We come together as Native people in urban Indian communities and organizations to honor and maintain those cultures that gave us birth.