Trego's Mountain Ear

Among my native students, occasionally I’d hear the comment “I’ve been assimilated” when another student would point out behavior that seemed inconsistent with the tribal background.  The phrase got me wondering – just how much did the American Indian assimilate the European immigrants who moved to the New World in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

In Appalachia, both the native Cherokee and the immigrant Scots had similar clan structures – sure, the Scots were patrilineal while the Cherokee were matrilineal, but both societies were otherwise similar.  Sam Houston was a Scots-Irish kid who was pretty well assimilated by the Cherokee (he left home at 14 to live among the Cherokee, and, while a successful White American politician, Sam really didn’t socially resemble his European forebears.

Genetically, I assay out less American Indian than Elizabeth Warren.  When I was working at SDSU, I had opportunities to check out the Dawes Rolls – and learned that the relative my Grandfather had in the Nations was an Elizabeth McCurry who had married into the Choctaw.  Not a particularly unusual thing – Tecumseh was close to marrying a white girl.  Assimilation works both ways – and that seems to be something that the folks who stayed in Europe don’t seem to recognize.

We white Americans have been assimilated by the Indians among whom we lived for generations.  Our form of government was copied from the Iroquois Confederation – a grouping of five northeastern tribes that occurred in the 12th Century and strongly influenced the structure of the US government (just as a point of fact, the Iroquois Confederation has lasted longer than our Constitutional form of government – even if we count from 1776).

If you look at world history in terms of Wallenstein’s World Systems theory, I can make an argument that Europe became a group of colonies (American colonies that is) somewhere between 1939 and 1945.  For the past 80 years, the US dollar has been the world currency.  The British Empire really ended with the agreement that the American dollar was the world currency.  France ended it’s claims to empire with the Franco-Prussian war in 1870, and World War 1 ended the fledgling German Empire, the Russian Empire, the Austria-Hungary Empire and the Ottomans.  Thing is, while we benevolently treated our European economic colonies, we didn’t work at assimilating them.

So I kind of understand the European leaders being shocked that a change in American Presidents yielded a change in support for Ukraine – they look at the Donald and think “White like me.”  They didn’t realize that even a New York real estate tycoon and reality TV star has been assimilated a bit. 

I guess the fact that we speak English screwed up the Brit prime minister – but the English language shows how the Saxons assimilated the Norman French (who were actually Vikings that were assimilated by the French).   Cultures assimilate both ways – and there’s still a touch of the American Indian cultures that shows up in American diplomacy.