A large Native American majority city within the United States?

Could any of the Native American groups or tribes within the United States urbanize into large industrialized cities? How big could a city like this get? Could you have a New Orleans size city? What impact would this have?
 
I don’t think their population was ever large enough. It definitely was not after European contact and the spread of diseases.
 

Betty Ford

Banned
Have the U.S. place all natives in one territory instead of different tribals lands like OTL. The capital city would likely be such.
 
No Trail of Tears means you could get decent sized cities in the South eventually IMO
Is it feasible? Rounding up(by a lot) about 100k natives(and slaves) were evicted or died during the ToT so I'm not sure that would be enough, especially if they aren't forcibily rounded up around one single territory(which I guess would be just another deportation)
 
Is it feasible? Rounding up(by a lot) about 100k natives(and slaves) were evicted or died during the ToT so I'm not sure that would be enough, especially if they aren't forcibily rounded up around one single territory(which I guess would be just another deportation)

In a very rosy scenario, the natives would become the majority ethnic group across their region, including the wealthy upper classes and landowners, allowing their population to boom. It’s unlikely, though. Maybe if the tribes were partially consolidated into a more compact area it could be achieved for one major city?
 
I mean, logically speaking if you have a majority-native area that industrializes(let's handwave things in the southeast, or have the US run into nasty trouble elsewhere and have a strong incentive to deal more favorably with native nations elsewhere), then all the pressures that happened elsewhere to create bigger cities are going to show up there too. The problem is "majority-native" and "industrialize", which will probably require changes in US policy and broader historical patterns.
 
In a very rosy scenario, the natives would become the majority ethnic group across their region, including the wealthy upper classes and landowners, allowing their population to boom. It’s unlikely, though. Maybe if the tribes were partially consolidated into a more compact area it could be achieved for one major city?
I mean it's not rosy, for a population to have that high of a fertility rate it must remain poor for a long period of time, although IOTL native americans despite all that had lower fertility rates(or growth rates) because diseases, alcohilism, isolation, segregation etc.
 
Could any of the Native American groups or tribes within the United States urbanize into large industrialized cities? How big could a city like this get? Could you have a New Orleans size city? What impact would this have?
If you more heavily concentrated Native Americans into a single territory, somewhere more marginal and less attractive to white farmers than Oklahoma, you could probably get a largish city out of that, which could then have factories and so on. New Orleans-sized (~390k ATM) is kind of a stretch, though, even if we play fast and loose with the requirement for a majority and only demand it be a plurality. The problem is that any major city in Indian Territory is probably going to be far and away the least Native American place there (unless there's no hinterland whatsoever and they've all been crammed into a tiny, incredibly urbanized area Gaza Strip-style for some reason), so to get a majority Native American city with more than one or two hundred thosuand people or so, you're going to have to change the demographics and Native American policy of the US in a big way. And that's just for a single Native American majority major city. Strictly speaking, you seem to be asking for the Native Americans themselves to form multiple major, industrialized cities on their own, and this would probably require some huge change like the Mississippian culture surviving that would butterfly the United States away entirely.
 
If you get the USA to annex all of Mexico somehow during the Mexican-American War, it would be possible to get a Mexico City of majority native ancestry in the Union. How that happens is another story of course, but it likely has to involve the USA incorporating Canada after the Revolution or possibly 1812 resulting in Mexico being incorporated for free/slave balance somehow.
 
The 5 Civilized Tribes side with the Union in the Civil War, the Government actually decides to keep a treaty, and white settlers are kept out of the Indian Territory and it's eventually admitted to the Union as a state.

Or Congress agrees to the proposal for a smaller Sequoyah Statehood in 1905.
 
Navajo alone has 170,000 speakers. The problem with having a native american majority city isn't that the numbers aren't there, but that for legal and cultural reasons, the right to call oneself a "native american" is heavily restricted. It's kind of like the opposite of African-American: if you're 1/8th black or more, you get called African-American. But to be legally and culturally "Native American", you have to be enrolled with a tribe, and raised in with a Native American background. That's because, since the US government has finally gotten around to honoring the treaties made with native american tribes to at least some degree, native americans get a number of privileges. So, naturally, the federal government wants to restrict the amount of people who can claim these privileges as much as possible.

So yes, it would have been easily possible from a logistical perspective for Native Americans to form a large city, but the fact that Native Americans tribes can't really assimilate new members (a few historical oddities like the Black Cherokee excepted) means that these cities eventually just become ordinary cities with a Native American heritage.
 
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