The University of Chicago studied the problems of identifying and enumerating the Indian population, with results quite at variance with official reports. At a time when government programs in the United States and Canada still predicated Indian assimilation, the Chicago study concluded that “Indian communities, as separate, distinct social systems, are increasing in population.”
As to these communities, even where there had been a history of “long, intensive contact with Euro-American society, the common acculturation pattern is for these small societies to take over, possibly, a great many Euro-American traits and institutions, but to fit them into a context of the older covert Indian patterns of life. More than tentatively, one can say that American Indian communities, as a whole, are distinct growing communities that still preserve the core of their native style of life.”
The conclusions of this study carry the subject beyond the consideration of numbers alone as a measure of Indian survival. The evidence for this ongoing Indian world is diverse and pervasive. Of the estimated 300 Indian languages spoken in the area north of Mexico at the time of discovery, at least half are in current use. Great numbers of Indian children start their formal schooling without knowledge of the English language and pose a problem for their English-speaking teachers. Kinship systems and lines of descent still function, often at variance with government record systems and legal procedures.
Individual Indians who dress, speak, and act like any contemporary American or Canadian, still play prescribed roles as clansmen, as members or even as heads of ritualistic societies, and as upholders of an older social order. It has recently been remarked that “Few Indian tribes have disappeared completely,” and while this is a surprising fact to most white men, it “indicates that these people are not being absorbed or assimilated into the dominant American culture. Indeed, American Indian groups still retain many aspects of their distinctive ways of life and in only rare instances become Americanized.”
The observation applies with equal force to the Indians of Canada. Various explanations have been offered for the persistence of Indian communities and tribal identity. At an earlier time it was asserted quite simply that these original inhabitants were incapable of assimilating the culture of the dominant society. They remained Indian because they could not reach beyond what they were. This view was starkly stated during a debate in the United States Senate in 1871, when a Senator from Illinois declared, “The Indians cannot be civilized; they will not be civilized; they do not want to be civilized. . . . We must treat them as savages.”
The point of view contained an inherent contradiction, since those who professed it were often the same ones who advocated coercive measures requiring the “savage” society to adopt the habits and values of Western civilization. A more rational modern thesis, put forward with some empirical findings, proposes a correlation between basic personality structure and cultural persistence.
Studies in this area are those conducted by Professor A. Irving Hallowell and some of his students dealing with the Chippewa Indians in Canada related bands are designated Ojibwa and Saulteaux. These Indians occupied an extensive area north of Lake Huron and around both shores of Lake Superior westward to Lake Winnipeg. Contact with Europeans through the fur trade occurred at an early date and their modern descendants display a wide range of acculturation. The northern group along the Berens River in western Ontario follow a hunting-trapping-fishing economy very close to the aboriginal mode described by early travelers and traders; and at the southern extreme the Wisconsin Chippewas live in close contact with their white neighbors, speak English, send their children to school with white children, and dress and behave very much like the whites. The purpose of the study was to determine, if possible, what agreement or conformity existed between observable acculturated behavior and the covert, inner life of the people.
The general outlines of post-contact Chippewa culture were reconstructed from the accounts of explorers, traders, missionaries, and others who had close association with the Indians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This descriptive material was supplemented by field observations and projective tests administered to adults and children. Hallowell had expected that the Wisconsin (Lac du Flambeau) Indians “would exhibit a radically different personality picture from that of the northern Ojibwa.” But this proved not to be so. He reported that, contrary to expectation, the studies furnished “a considerable body of evidence that all points in the same direction—a persistent core of psychological characteristics sufficient to identify an Ojibwa personality constellation, aboriginal in origin, that is clearly discernible through all levels of acculturation yet studied.