The issue is whether a minority group can preserve its culture in a pluralistic society, and the answer depends on what degree of culture is being considered and what specific minority group is under discussion. The Native American population represents one of the most invisible of all American minority groups for most of the country, for much of the population has been relegated to reservations on land separated from the majority society to a great degree. On the reservation, the native population has been able to maintain certain traditions, but long before the current reservation system came into being, the onslaught of white society has been such that the Native American population was reduced in numbers, removed from its former lands, cut off from much of what constituted its culture, and morally and spiritually damaged as well.
The Native Americans of today tend to be either reservation Indians or urban Indians, and since World War II the urban Indian population has increased greatly, reducing the size of the reservation population. This has been one of the reasons for the destruction of the Indians' own culture:
For better or worse, urban Indians are more intimately involved in the dominant culture than their reservation brethren, though even the latter have become "urbanized"--more sophisticated--through travel, school, movies, television, and their own production of news and entertainment (Jennings 399).
The reservation of the Chippewa is described as part of a long-term fraud committed on this tribe, and other tribes, by the government:
The White Earth Reservation has become a dubious measure of rapacious federal policies that dominated the land and dislocated communal cultures at the same time (Vizenor 31).
Another of the major forces that has been destructive to Native American culture is government interference, and even when well-intentioned, this has often produced destructive forces causing grea...