I find that historical levels of assimilation are consistently associated with higher levels of per capita income in all census years.
I estimate the relationship between cultural assimilation in 1900 and per capita income from 1970 through 2020. After classifying each name, I calculated the reservation-specific share of non-indigenous names. To calculate the distribution of name types, I have gathered the names and locations for all American Indians enumerated in the 1900 United States census. To quantify the impact of such policies, I introduce a novel measure of cultural assimilation: the prevalence of traditional indigenous names relative to common American first names.
In this paper, I take advantage of tribal-level variation in the application of federal policies to estimate the effect of assimilation on long-run economic performance. While scholars have often been interested in the impact of past federal policy on current levels of economic development among American Indian tribes, none have explicitly examined the influence of federal assimilation policy on long-run economic development. Throughout the nineteenth century, federal Indian policy oscillated between two extreme positions: assimilation versus isolation.
