appropriated the house for themselves, according to Lela Latch Lloyd.
No matter how thoroughly Native Americans acculturated, they could not
succeed in white society. Whites would not let them. “Indians were always
regarded as aliens, and were rarely allowed to live within white society
except on its periphery,” according to Nash.^112 Native Americans who
amassed property, owned European-style homes, perhaps operated sawmills,
merely became the first targets of white thugs who coveted their land and
improvements. In time of war the position of assimilated Indians grew
particularly desperate. Consider Pennsylvania. During the French and Indian
War the Susquehannas, living peaceably in white towns, were hatcheted by
their neighbors, who then collected bounties from authorities who weren’t
careful whose scalp they were paying for, so long as it was Indian. Through the
centuries and across the country, this pattern recurred. In 1860, for instance,
California ranchers killed 185 of the 800 Wiyots, a tribe allied with the
whites, because they were angered by other tribes’ cattle raids.^113
The new textbooks do a splendid job telling how the “Five Civilized
Tribes”—Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees, Creeks, and Seminoles—
acculturated successfully, but were exiled to Oklahoma anyway. Nevertheless,
authors never let these settled Indians interfere with the traditional story line.
Forgetting how whites forced Natives to roam, forgetting just who taught the
Pilgrims to farm in the first place, our culture and our textbooks still stereotype
Native Americans as roaming primitive hunting folk, hence unfortunate victims
of progress. As Boorstin and Kelley put it, “North of Mexico, most of the
people lived in wandering tribes and led a simple life. North American Indians
were mainly hunters and gatherers of wild food. An exceptional few—in
Arizona and New Mexico—settled in one place and became farmers.”
Ironically, to Native eyes, Europeans were the nomads. As Chief Seattle put
it in 1855, “To us the ashes of our ancestors are sacred and their resting place
is hallowed ground. You wander far from the graves of your ancestors and
seemingly without regret.” In contrast, Indian “roaming” consisted mainly of
moving from summer homes to winter homes and back again.^114
One way to understand why acculturation couldn’t work for most Natives is
to imagine that the United States allowed lawless discrimination against all
people whose last name starts with the letter L. How long would we last? The
first non-L people who wanted our homes or jobs could force us out, and we