"Only One Truth": Assimilation and the American Indian

Abstract

Larry W. Burt. Tribalism in Crisis: Federal Indian Policy, 1953-1961. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982,180 + x pp. Thomas W. Dunlay. Wolves for the Blue Soldiers: Indian Scouts and Auxiliaries with the United States Army. 1860-90. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. 304 + xii pp. Laurence M. Hauptman. The Iroquois and the New Deal. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1981. 256 + xviii pp. Peter Iverson. Carlos Montezuma and the Changing World of American Indians. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 1982. 222 + xv pp. Clyde A. Milner II. With Good Intentions: Quaker Work among the Pawnees. Otos. and Omahas in the 1870s. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. 238 + xvi pp. Richard K. Nelson. Make Prayers to the Raven: A Koyukon View of the Northern Forest. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1983. 292 + xvi pp. W. Raymond Wood and Margot Liberty, eds. Anthropology on the Great Plains. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1980.306 + vii pp. Celebrating the passage in 1887 of an act designed to break up the reservations and provide individual Indians with their own allotments, the Indian Rights Association offered a model definition of assimilation: the "general policy of gradually making the Indian in all respects as the white man."1 A constant in American thinking about the "Indian problem," often posited as the only alternative to racial extinction, assimilation dominated policy in the years after the Civil War. A vigorous attack on its assumptions through the 1920s shaped the Indian New Deal in the next decade, but assimilation was back in vogue in the wake of World War II. By the 1960s it was out of favor again, but it still constitutes a major ideological position in policy debate as one of the poles implied by the current catch-phrase "self-determination." Indians should be free to choose whether to live outside or inside white society, to remain distinctive, in short, or to assimilate. Not surprisingly, the issue of assimilation looms large in most studies of the American Indian.