erican Southwest, Edward H. Spicer says: "The spread of religious ideas, of forms of government, of language, of tools and techniques, and of other elements of culture from the peoples of Western cultural backgrounds to the Indians of the Southwest has appeared to most non-Indian observers as unexpectedly slow."
Vogt summarizes the common hypotheses for the slow rate of assimilation among the American Indian. The first argument is that the isolation of Indians on remote reservations has meant that the Indian remained isolated from the means of assimilation --education, communications, and similar institutions. A second argument, advanced by Dozier, claims that forced acculturation leads to a high degree of resistance to change in indigenous cultural patterns. A third argument is that while material aspects of a culture change readily enough, family and kinship patterns are more persistent. A fourth hypothesis emphasizes the importance of an organized communal structure.
Spicer, on the other hand, is not remarkably surprised by the slow rate of a
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