Could full assimilation be seen being as a workable alternative to the Native American removal of the 19th Century?

The US government in some ways did attempt to assimilate Native Americans, this could be seen as a workable, although problematic, alternative to removal. These assimilation attempts more often than not focused on the erasure of Native American identity and its replacement by civilised Americanisation, for example the 1883 Code of Indian Offences which outlawed many traditional rituals and the highly revered ‘medicine men’ whose ‘use [of] any of the arts of the conjurer to prevent the Indians from abandoning their heathenish rites and customs’, the penalties for this ranging from the loss of government rations and imprisonment. Another assimilation method used to further erase Native American identity was the creation of non-reservation boarding schools; these schools also served to minimise the Native American population as the conditions at these schools made the children highly ‘susceptible to deadly infections like tuberculosis and the flu’. These schools attempts at erasing Native identity included ‘[forbidding] Native American children from using their own languages and names, as well as from practicing their religion and culture. They were given new Anglo-American names, clothes, and haircuts, and told they must abandon their way of life because it was inferior to white people’s.’ The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition has identified that ‘the US Boarding School policies severely impacted the thousands of children who experienced forced removal from their parents, families and communities and the brutal physical, sexual, cultural, spiritual and emotional abuse that took place in the government mandated schools’. Much of this forced assimilation is now attempting to be undone in order to re-form Native American identity, for example the creation of language immersion schools and bilingual schools such as Sequoyah High School in Oklahoma which teaches in both English and Cherokee. Though some of the assimilation attempts were well intended, such as Chief Justice Taney of the Supreme Courts assertion that ‘[Native Americans could] be entitled to all the the rights and privileges which would belong to an emigrant from any other foreign people’, institutionalised racism meant that all too often these were forgone and human rights abuses prevailed. Though ultimately assimilation could be seen as a workable alternative to the Native American removals, it would have come at a great cost.