A cultural blending is generally considered a good thing by those who have not participated in it. The residents of West Lafayette, Indiana, a town with a very large white majority, probably are glad that there is as much diversity as there is, although this is not much. This is certainly a much more mature viewpoint than that of the ethnic groups in, say, eastern Europe, all of whom seem to hate each other's guts, although it tends to neglect the fact that it took many years of struggle to achieve even the current state of kinda-maybe-almost-nonracism in the USA. Yet, in the words of Neal Stephenson regarding heterogeneous but ultra-tolerant culture, "Once you have done away with the ability to make judgements as to right and wrong, true and false, etc., there's no real culture left. All that remains is clog dancing and macrame. The ability to make judgements, to believe things, is the entire point of having a culture." Do the Bosnians, Serbs, and Croats have it right?

There is a critical difference between the assimilation and annihilation by Europeans of so many peoples, and the more visible fights between ethnic factions in eastern Europe. When Europeans drove the Native Americans to the west, they did so not so much out of a hate of the Native American culture, but out of simple greed. The Europeans did not care that the natives were not Christian, but only that they were easy to fool.

In the various writings the class has read, there has been an everpresent theme of conflict. In some places, such as in "The Interesting Narrative Of Olaudah Equiano", the conflict seems simply tragic. In others, such as in Canessatego's response to the whites' offer of a college education, it just seems silly.

It is my tentative conclusion that nothing other than a tentative conclusion can be made about how "good" or "bad" this mixing of cultures is. What if the Europeans had never met the Native Americans? This question is meaningless, because it is very hard to miss the existence two continents, when you have satellite photographs of that side of the world. In other words, we would have met the Native Americans eventually no matter what happened. A more meaningful question is this: what if we had met the Native Americans earlier or later in history? Is it possible to speculate about this question with any sort of validity?

In the end, one's viewpoint on this subject must come down to one simple question: Do the ends justify the means?