The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

Chapter 5 focuses on the different ways that white people have practiced a policy of “assimilation” in their dealings with Indigenous people. Advocates of assimilation treated Indigenous people as “humans at an early point in the evolution of the species” who could be bettered through the introduction of civilization and Christianity (102). Assimilation differs from policies of “extermination,” which argued for the death of Indigenous peoples according to the logic of the “survival of the fittest” (101). King argues that assimilation combined with extermination in the 19th century, leading to “assaults that sought to dismantle Native culture [… and] replace it with something that Whites could recognize” (102).

Many early advocates of assimilation tactics were Christian missionaries, such as the Jesuits or Puritans, who formed Christian schools and other initiatives to convert Indigenous tribes to Christianity. However, assimilation did not become a widespread federal policy until the end of the 19th century, when retired US Army officer Richard Pratt began advocating for the creation of special schools to teach Indigenous youth to adopt White customs and values. Pratt proclaimed that these schools would “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man,” and declared that any trace of Indigenous culture must be erased from his students (107).