{"id":34148,"date":"2018-01-17T08:40:00","date_gmt":"2018-01-17T16:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/library.josephy.org\/2018\/01\/the-early-assimilationists\/"},"modified":"2018-01-17T08:40:00","modified_gmt":"2018-01-17T16:40:00","slug":"the-early-assimilationists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/2018\/01\/the-early-assimilationists\/","title":{"rendered":"The Early Assimilationists"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\n
<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Pocahontas–aka Lady Rebecca<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

I don\u2019t know when it started\u2014maybe with the very first meetings of Europeans and the Indians of North America. The Powhatan child, Pocahontas, at the Jamestown settlement, is certainly an early example of an Indian captured, converted, and assimilated by the English. <\/p>\n

(A caveat: I am thinking of the English and other Northern Europeans\u2019 colonization of North America, and not of the Spanish and Portuguese in Central and South America, where other, often brutal, modes of assimilation were carried out.)<\/p>\n

Although Pocahontas probably did not \u201csave\u201d Captain John Smith, she was familiar to the colonists at Jamestown, and in 1613 was captured and held by the English. In captivity she was instructed in Christianity and baptized \u201cLady Rebecca,\u201d and apparently fell in love with one of her captors, John Rolfe. Wahunsonacock, her aging father, who had a complicated relationship with the colonists, at this point had them under siege, but in order to see his daughter again, he agreed to peace and her marriage to Rolfe. The couple, accompanied by a group of Powhatan, including Tomocomo, who the chief tasked with \u201ccounting the people,\u201d went to England, where she was a sensation, a model of the \u201ctransformed savage.\u201d Unfortunately and quite understandably, given the Indians lack of resistance to European diseases, she died of smallpox on the return voyage to America. Tomocomo apparently gave up counting the English.<\/p>\n

It is probable that the numbers of Europeans and the lack of Indian resistance to their diseases were on the minds of many North American Indians as the foreigners came in larger and larger numbers, bringing guns, iron tools, livestock, culture, religion, and diseases with them. There were wars and there were treaties, and the ferocious forces of numbers, diseases, and a religious culture that considered itself divinely driven and the custodian of ultimate truth were relentless in displacing the indigenous Americans by killing, removal, or assimilation.<\/p>\n

Alvin Josephy believed and stated often that the Indians had these three choices; he said also that the Europeans\u2019 preferred choice was most often assimilation, making Indians white. <\/p>\n

Why?<\/p>\n

Killing<\/i> all of the indigenous people would have been an extraordinary task\u2014they were many peoples living in many different environments, and they knew the land as the invaders did not. And the newcomers needed their guidance: Where did the waters begin and end? What was on the other side of the mountain? How deep would the snow be?  But mostly the Europeans needed what the Indians had\u2014land and the natural and agricultural resources that the land contained and supported.<\/p>\n

Removal<\/i> would become the preferred option under Andrew Jackson, and again in the major treaty period as the Euro-Americans moved across the continent. But in the early days, the new Euro-Americans needed the Indians in their places for reasons above.<\/p>\n

Assimilation<\/i>, the third choice, was that of reasonable men because they could use the information and sometimes the labor and military alliances with tribal people who were alive and in or near their native places.<\/p>\n

There were Indian tribes and individuals who resisted, but resistance meant war\u2014and then death, or removal, leaving traditional lands, or some kind of accommodation, or assimilation.  Back to the three alternatives.<\/p>\n

For many of the newcomers there were moral arguments for assimilation. They had moral standards\u2014promoted by a body of English common law and a religion that asked that people be treated fairly and honestly. I believe that the religious argument for assimilation\u2014and conversion\u2014was the primary motivation for most of the early critics of those who treated Indians unfairly, the driving force of early assimilationists.<\/p>\n

In 1880, Helen Hunt Jackson published A Century of Dishonor,<\/i> a stinging critique of private and government actions against Indians. She wrote about the massacre at Sand Creek and the Nez Perce War, chronicling misdeed after misdeed, a \u201cCentury of Dishonor.\u201d<\/p>\n

H.B. Whipple, Bishop of Minnesota, wrote the preface, calling it a \u201csad revelation of broken faith, of violated treaties, and of inhuman deeds of violence [that] will bring a flush of shame to the cheeks of those who love their country\u2026 Dark as the history is, there is a brighter side. No missions to the heathen have been more blessed than those among the Indians. Thousands who were once wild, painted savages, finding their greatest joy in deeds of war, are now the disciples of the Prince of Peace.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jackson herself, in an author\u2019s note at the beginning of the volume, says that \u201cThe history of the missionary labors of the different churches among the Indians would make another volume. It is the one bright spot on the dark record.\u201d<\/p>\n

However misguided, and in order to understand all later attempts to \u201cmake Indians white,\u201d we must acknowledge the moral ground on which the early assimilationists  stood.<\/p>\n

# # #<\/p>\n

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Pocahontas–aka Lady Rebecca I don\u2019t know when it started\u2014maybe with the very first meetings of Europeans and the Indians of North America. The Powhatan child, Pocahontas, at the Jamestown settlement, is certainly an early example of an Indian captured, converted, and assimilated by the English. (A caveat: I am thinking of the English and other […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[247,455,453,456,454],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34148"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34148"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34148\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/library.josephy.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}