American Indian Culture and Research Journal

One cannot understand Native American history from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries without confronting the ambiguities of white American nationalism. Historically, this phenomenon has been composed of two essential ingredients: a tolerant conviction, based on the Old Testament, that all men and all races sprang from the same original parents; and an intolerant conviction that any acknowledgment of racial unity must be accompanied by total social conversion of colonized groups to white American culture. Both attitudes-theoretical racial acceptance and complete "Anglo-conformity" - have been key facets of American Indian policy for nearly three hundred fifty years.