The Mission’s ‘Little Rez’ was as soon as the middle of Native American life in San Francisco

The route of almost all Native Americans who came to San Francisco in the 1960s led straight to Warren’s Slaughterhouse Bar.

According to all reports, the dive on the mission was gritty and sometimes rough, but for tribesmen fresh from the “Rez” it was more than that. Aside from cold beer and whiskey, Warren’s Slaughterhouse served something that indigenous transplants didn’t know about, that they lacked: a political awakening.

Although San Francisco has always been the land of the Ramaytush Ohlons, in 1970 they were only a handful of the estimated 20,000 Native Americans living in the city. People came from across the country – from the Pine Ridge Oglala Lakota Reservation and Fort Hall Shoshone-Bannock Reservation to the Pyramid Lake Paiute Reservation and the St. Regis (Akwesasne) Mohawk Reservation – fueled by the promised Indian economic support and professional training Relocation Act of 1956.

But the voluntary program that led Indigenous Americans from their reservations to one of six major cities, including San Francisco, was intended not to empower the indigenous peoples, but to destroy them. The designers of the program believed that if the indigenous peoples were removed from their cultural heritage on Indian reservations, the indigenous peoples would finally be accepted into the American melting pot and the “problem” of the Indians finally solved. The assumption could not have been more wrong.

Most who arrived in San Francisco in the mid-20th century had never lived outside the reserve before, and navigating the urban landscape was a process that many found overwhelming and alienating. While those who came under the Indian Relocation Act were guaranteed temporary housing, professional training, and a year of career counseling, and a $ 140 monthly check, the benefits were seldom achieved in full. The resettled natives were largely left to their own devices.

In San Francisco, indigenous resettlement revolved around Little Rez or Red Ghetto, an enclave bordered by Market Street and Division Street to the north and 20th Street to the south, including parts of what is now Castro and mission. The neighborhood was full of single rooms and apartment buildings and was a hotbed of low-income housing and high unemployment, with immigrants from different ethnic groups battling for meager resources.

Even so, the confused newcomers found community in Little Rez. They found work and accommodation at the Indian Centers at 495 Valencia St. and 229 St. Valencia, sold traditional artwork at Al Smith’s Indian Trading Post at Mission 2200, and gathered for breakfast at Aunt Mary’s, a café across from the Roxie Theater on 16th street. They attended lectures and poetry readings in Muddy Waters and Modern Times and drank in “Indian bars” like the Rainbow Cattle Company on Duboce and Valencia streets.

The most famous of the neighborhood’s Indian bars was Warren’s Slaughterhouse at 3079 16th Street. Owned by a Klamath Indian couple, Ruby and Frank Loureiro, Warren’s was the hub around which both tribal friendships and political awareness sparked. It was there that Mohawk Richard Oakes, the de facto leader of the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz Island, bartender, and Lakota Russell Means, the future leader of the American Indian Movement, first heard of the federal government’s efforts to completely eradicate Native Americans. And that’s where Pan-Indianism, Native American national activism, began to take shape.

While the resettlement was meant to sever the last ties between Native Americans and their heritage, Indigenous immigrants refused to give up. They created common channels for cultural expression and discovered that the hardships and discrimination they faced both on and off the reservation were not just a Sioux problem or a Paiute problem, but a problem of the Indians. They had different languages ​​and stories, but they shared a common goal: self-determination.

Instead of assimilating, the indigenous people in Little Rez and elsewhere in the Bay Area banded together. At Warren’s, discussions continued late into the night. Both the Indians of All Tribes, one of the country’s first pan-Indian political organizations, and the 19-month Native American takeover of Alcatraz Island in 1969 were at least partially planned in the bar.

It was also with Warren that Oakes was nearly killed in 1970 after being hit twice in the head with a pool cue. The assailant, whose nose Oakes had broken in a brawl at the bar two months earlier, was a Samoan immigrant, an ethnic group with whom some members of the Little Rez, including the Indian gang Thunderbirds, often conflicted.

Despite the social and economic tensions that spread in the neighborhood, there was no major event that led to the fall of Little Rez. Arson burned the American Indian Center in Valencia to the ground in October 1969, 495, and over time, venues like Warren’s closed their doors; Sometime in the 1970s, the famous Indian bar Esta Noche became a major Latinx gay bar, which closed in 2014. Many Native Americans left the neighborhood and moved to other neighborhoods and cities like San Jose and Berkeley, supported by organizations like the Intertribal Friendship House in Oakland and the Indian Health Center. Some – nobody knows exactly how many – became disaffected with urban life and returned to their reservations.

Although none of the original companies and organizations that were instrumental in Little Rez remain in the Northern Mission, Native American activists continue to honor their legacy. On March 31, 2020, San Francisco named the area the American Indian Cultural District (AICD) in recognition of the past and present experiences of the indigenous people in the city, from the pre-colonial days of the Ramaytush Ohlone to the present day.