The Nature of Assimilation

Abstract

What happens “when peoples meet,” as the phrase goes?1 Such meetings in the modem world are likely to take place under a variety of circumstances: colonial conquest, military occupation, redrawing of national boundaries to include diverse ethnic groups, large-scale trade and missionary activity, technical assistance to underdeveloped countries, displacement of an aboriginal population, and voluntary immigration which increases the ethnic diversity of the host country. In the American continental experience, the last two types have been the decisive ones. The displacement and attempted incorporation of the American Indian on the white conqueror’s terms, and the massive immigration into this land of over 41 million people, largely from Europe but also from the other Americas and to a smaller extent from the Orient, from the days of the thinly populated and, even then, ethnically varied seaboard republic to the continent-spanning nation of the present, constitute the setting for the “meeting of peoples” in the American context.