Transcript: Reverend Dr. Michael James Oleksa, Ph.D.
Perspectives on the assimilation of immigrants and indigenous people
- [Oleksa:]
- The late 1800s when Alaska was just becoming sort of an integral part of the United States, the federal policy was at that time not just for Native Americans, but especially for immigrants, to learn how to be Anglo-Americans. That was the standard against which the immigrants and also the indigenous people were compared. And the Native people, of course, didn’t know that Anglo-Americans existed. The federal government decided that we need to assimilate them into the melting pot like everybody else. The immigrants were eager to be assimilated, that’s why they came, but the indigenous people had a very different attitude toward the dominant culture. It wasn’t the culture they had chosen to join. They hadn’t decided to come to America; they were already here, and the immigrant could assimilate into Anglo-American culture because the survival of their ancestral culture was not their responsibility. There was a homeland, whether it was Lithuania or Greece or Slovakia, where millions of people were going to take care of the survival and continuation of that culture, its language, its folk traditions, its poetry, history, literature, and so forth. forth. But for Native Americans to assimilate meant to cooperate in the demise of that culture. So it puts an indigenous tribe into a very different relationship to the dominant culture. Immigrants are eager to join and fit in and be accepted. Indigenous people are doing everything they can, probably since 1492 to remain unique and distinct.