Leo Zonn, Department of Geography, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, 27599. E-mail: zonn@unc.edu and Dick G. Winchell, Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Eastern Washington University, Spokane, WA 99202. E-mail: dwinchell@ewu.edu.

Lived Spaces of the Urban American Indian: The Exiles (1962) as Documentary Representation.

More than sixty percent of American Indians live in the city, with the largest number concentrated in Los Angeles, and yet, as Ned Blackhawk wrote in 1995, ³the experiences of urban American Indians clearly remain marginalized in the study of American Indian history.² Geographers should be encouraged to direct attention toward these experiences, particularly from within emerging post-colonial, representational, and identity literatures. The purpose of this paper is to study The Exiles (1962), an ethnographic-based documentary film of American Indians living in Los Angeles, within select frames from these bodies of work. The film is a study of daily-lived experiences of American Indian migrants who came to Los Angeles from reservations in the 1950s and 1960s, mostly in response to federally funded relocation incentive programs, that can be seen as a representational pioneer in that the focus is not framed upon an Other as individual or culture or as a mirror of white angst, guilt, or judgment. Instead the narration lets the tale subtly unfold within an oral tradition, complete with unique markers, hints, and visions that ultimately confront the ³old west² traditions reflected in the Edward Curtis photographs that frame the filmıs beginning. The Exiles represents a contentious intersection of urban space, power differentials, identity constructions, and a cultural persistence of American Indians, all within the frame of daily-lived experiences in urban Los Angeles.

Keyword: American Indian, representation, urban geography.