The purpose of this research is to examine American Indian cultural values with respect to how those values affect Indian acculturation and assimilation into the dominant culture of the United States.
In the wake of violent confrontations between Indian and the established power structure of the United States--at Alcatraz, at Wounded Knee, at the Bureau of Indian Affairs--Robert Burnette and John Koster wrote: "The American Indian today is a product of history and of the disruptive elements of modern society. Federal policies--from the signing of the Constitution down to the present day--can be said to legislate his every waking action, for good, or, more frequently, for ill." There is little doubt that this is true. During the great period of Westward expansion in the United States, the Indian was viewed by the settlers--the white man--as a barbaric force to be exterminated, often with the approval and the aid of the Federal government. The American Indian was defeated in battle and in the peace that followed those battles. Deprived of their land, shunted off to isolated reservations where the land was of poor quality for agriculture or anything else, the Indian was persecuted and deprived throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. "Two facts show how far apart the experience of the Indian has set him: only the Indian, of all Americans, has ever been subjected to a conscious and stated policy of genocide by the United States government; and only the Indian, of all Americans, has been denied freedom of religion and suffered relentless persecution at the hands of the government or with their enthusiastic approval."
Certainly other ethnic minority groups have met with prejudice and discrimination in' the United States. Successive waves of immigrants--Irish, German, Italian, Puerto Rican--have suffered the dual pangs of acculturation and assimilation. But other minority groups, after a generation or perhaps two h...