It’s a Sunday night in downtown Los Angeles and my friend, Kumeyaay Indian filmmaker Cedar Sherbert, hits me with an interesting question.
Once upon a time in Los Angeles: The Exiles' non-pro actors take to the streets
Yvonne Walker (nee Williams), circa 1961
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Once upon a time in Los Angeles: The Exiles' non-pro actors take to the streets
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Yvonne Walker (nee Williams), circa 1961
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Kent Mackenzie directs on the set
“Close your eyes and try to picture an Indian,” he says. “What do you see?”
We’re walking at a steady clip toward the dive bars of Third and Main streets, and the question catches me off guard. I was in the midst of visualizing a beer. Cedar, thankfully, doesn’t give me time to respond.
“I think most people would say they see a man, probably wearing feathers, maybe even on horseback in the plains,” he says. “Definitely not a woman, or an urban Indian in jeans. Popular conceptions of Indian-ness are tied to this strange, all-male universe — someone’s romantic idea of the past.”
Times, of course, have changed. Nearly two-thirds of all American Indians now live in urban areas, up from 8 percent in 1940. While American Indians have long made their presence felt in cities like Seattle and San Francisco, Los Angeles is Native America’s unheralded urban hub. More than 150,000 people in L.A. County identify themselves as American Indian — the largest population of urban Indians in the U.S. — and that doesn’t even include the local Tongva and Gabrieleno tribes, which are currently vying for federal recognition.
While some Native people came here independently, and others are undoubtedly descendants of the Sherman Indian High School in Riverside (which for more than 70 years removed Indian children from reservations and forcibly assimilated them into white American culture), many were part of a two-decade, government-sponsored Indian exodus from reservations to urban areas.
In 1952, the federal government, through its Bureau of Indian Affairs, implemented the Urban Indian Relocation Program, a voluntary plan that paid rural Indians to leave the reservation and start new lives in the city. Los Angeles was one of seven BIA-proscribed destination points, and arguably the most popular. As tens of thousands of Indians made their way here, the old, Victorian boarding houses of Bunker Hill became their waystations.
The bars of Third and Main were their stomping grounds.
When Bunker Hill was bulldozed in the late ’60s to make way for skyscrapers, its Indian enclave scattered, never to reform in any concrete fashion. Whenever Cedar and I go downtown, he has the habit of pointing to the stretch of buildings at Third and Main and reminding me that “those used to be Indian bars.” He always says “used to,” but neither of us has ever actually been inside.
So we decide to finally take a look.
Approaching the intersection, we suddenly spot dozens of people crowding around an unassuming white truck parked on the northeast corner. The gathering looks like a block party — which, these days, would be unusual for this part of town. This particular corner generally has more in common with Skid Row to the east than it does with the livelier, gentrified neighborhoods to the south and west.
Fifty years ago, though, this area would have been packed with American Indians. Some would have been savvy city kids looking to drink, dance and generally raise hell. Others would have been fresh from the sticks of Oklahoma or Arizona, just looking for a familiar face.
Tonight, a few small dive bars, interspersed with some shuttered mom-and-pop businesses, are the only signs of life in these bleak environs. Signs hanging from a chainlink fence next to the white truck indicate the area won’t stay this way for long. The arrival of new “mixed-use commercial and residential space” — which most likely means a new Starbucks, a Jamba Juice and several million dollars’ worth of luxury condos — appears imminent. But for now, the block maintains its rough edge, as evidenced by this apparent street party, which, upon closer inspection, turns out to be a crew of Skid Row homeless scoring hot meals from a mobile mission.
Shortly before we hit Third Street, Cedar’s friend Yolanda Cruz, a Native filmmaker originally from Mexico, joins our fact-finding expedition — even though she’d rather be at the more fashionable Pete’s up the block.
“This is kind of depressing,” she jokes. “Why did the center of Indian activity have to be a bar? Why not a park or a bowling alley or something?”
We reach our destination and step inside the Five Stars Bar, where the older, mostly Mexican clientele sit quietly on barstools sipping Tecate. Despite its faded façade, the interior of the place is striking — high ceilings, dark tasteful trim and subtle lighting. An old-time, polished brass bar in the back of the room complements a newer marble one up front. No Indians in sight. No traces of their ever having been here.
