One of the dismissive phrases I heard when I was among the Dakota/Lakota people was “So I’m assimilated.” The words admitted a loss of Native culture and the acceptance of being part of the dominant European immigrant culture of North America. I’ve often thought on that phrase over the past 25 years, and, as I watch Europeans, I realize how much the Native Americans have assimilated the European immigrants.
Our US form of government is largely taken from the Iroquois confederacy. My Scots ancestors found a similar (though matrilineal) clan structures among the Cherokee and Choctaw people of Appalachia – “the civilized tribes”. The Lakota became horse Indians around 1775 – and then assimilated the ranch work when cattle replaced the buffalo. I have no Native American DNA – but in attitudes, I’ve been assimilated. I am culturally much more American than I am European.
Americans move at three times the rate of Europeans. Over the generations, we have picked up on the mobility of the Native Americans. While the reservation system was designed to reduce mobility, the Natives assimilated us, and we are not a stationary, sedentary people. We’re assimilated.
Twenty-three and me shows the Scandinavian’s on my mother’s side – but despite 300 years in Appalachia, there is still a significant Viking component in that mountain side of the tree – probably a half-millennium as those Viking ancestors were assimilated by the lowland Scots. Probably the only people who could be civilized by living among the Scots would be the Vikings – and I suspect that civilizing my Scots-Irish predecessors was a heck of a challenge for the Cherokee (and the four other ‘Civilized’ tribes). The last Confederate general to surrender was Stand Watie – second Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation. The Eastern Cherokee Chief, William Holland Thomas was as lily-white as I – but in 1839, Chief Yonaguska selected Thomas as his successor. Part of being assimilated by the civilized tribes was being color blind, so far as race or skin color goes. Thomas’ legion, composed of Cherokee and white Appalachian mountaineers, fought (and won) the final battle of the war between the states east of the Mississippi. White Americans have been assimilated by the natives, as well as the other way around.
Being assimilated by the American Indians is a good thing.
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