My friend is a white male, so when has his ilk ever had to assimilate to anything in America? It’s easy to tell others to assimilate to your societal views, when it requires no change on your part.

His views on assimilation were especially distasteful to me, because I am an American Indian—a group of people who were forced to assimilate. Nor am I talking about things that happened hundreds of years ago.

My wife’s mother remembers the day she was “captured,” that’s the word she uses. In the late 1940s-early 1950s Navajos didn’t own cars, so when a car came down the road Indian parents warned their children to run into the hills and hide until the white people left. One day, my mother-in-law was too slow and the people in the car grabbed her, threw her in the back seat and took her from Arizona to Oklahoma so she could be assimilated. She was nine.

My father-in-law was only 5 when white government workers came to his rural Arizona community, yanked him away from his mother and sent him to Oklahoma.

They were children who did not speak English, who did not understand what was happening, who feared they would never see their families again.