Describe the provisions of the Employment Assistance Program. What were the consequences of implementing this program?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

In 1952, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) began programs to relocate young Native Americans to urban areas. One of these programs, after 1962, was called the Employment Assistance Program, EAP. The EAP's primary provision was for relocation, individually or in families, at government expense, to urban areas where job opportunities were greater than those on the reservations. The BIA stressed that the EAP was voluntary, but this was a fiction given the lack of viable economic alternatives open to American Indians. The program was not a success for the many Native Americans who found the urban experience unsuitable or unbearable. By 1965, one-fourth to one-third of the people in the EAP had returned to their home reservations. So great was the rate of return that in 1959 the BIA stopped releasing data on the percentage of returnees, fearing that they would give too much ammunition to critics of the EAP.

The movement of Native Americans into urban areas has had many unintended consequences. It has further reduced the labor force on the reservation. Those who leave tend to be better educated, creating the Native American version of the brain drain. Urbanization unquestionably contributed to the development of an intertribal network, or pan-Indian movement. The city became the new meeting place of Native Americans, who learned of their common predicament both in the city and on the 325 federally administered reservations. Government agencies also had to develop a policy of continued assistance to nonreservation Native Americans; despite such efforts, the problems of Native Americans in cities persist.