The American environment is a culturally splintered and future-related society, representative of the freedoms, stresses, and acute needs created by a modern life style. The contemporary Native American renaissance in America is a direct response to the technological urban lifestyle that dominates the quality of American life. This resurgence is coming out of the future, not from the past, because the Indian revival is created in the cities and not from the mysticism of desert mountains and plains. Government attempts to assimilate tribal America have worked in the reverse. Hardships of city living, with its human isolation, were met by a renewal of Indian personality. Ethnography has largely dealt with the material shape of culture and now anthropology needs to develop new schemes of culture that give function to the "soft-ware" of ethnic fulfillment--the psychological strengths that offer both fulfillment and renewal. Both retention and resurgence of ethnicity suggest there are powerful needs to fulfill in retaining cultural systems and cultural identity. Ethnicity, retention of the first language, religious ceremonies, and fulfillment can be the very structure of personality or individualism. (AH)