In their book The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow write the following:
"The colonial history of North and South America is full of accounts of settlers, captured or adopted by indigenous societies, being given the choice of where they wished to stay and almost invariably choosing to stay with the latter."
To support this, they cite a 1977 study by Joseph Norman Heard titled The Assimilation of Captives on the American Frontier in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.
Some historians have contested this and Wengrow has defended the claim. I was wondering what AskHistorians thinks of this?
This specific citation bears comment, as it was highlighted in a fairly critical review historian Daniel Immerwahr wrote in ‘The Nation.’
As you note in your question, Graeber and Wengrow cite a 1977 dissertation to support their claim. Immerwahr says this source actually argues the opposite, summarizing its argument as:
“Persons of all races and cultural backgrounds reacted to captivity in much the same way is its thesis; generally, young children assimilated into their new culture and older captives didn’t.”
Wengrow responded by saying Immerwahr was reading the source wrong. The dissertation is accessible here. The exact quote from the dissertation is:
“Boys and girls captured below the age of puberty almost always became assimilated while persons taken prisoner above that age usually retained the desire to return to white civilization.” (page vi)
The conclusion says the same thing at much greater length (pp. 306-318).
Immerwahr goes on to write:
“Graeber in particular was better known for being interesting than right, and he would gleefully make pronouncements that either couldn’t be confirmed (the Iraq War was retribution for Saddam Hussein’s insistence that Iraqi oil exports be paid for in euros) or were never meant to be (“White-collar workers don’t actually do anything”).”
I would say this is a fairly reasonably description of critiques of both "Dawn of Everthing" and Graeber's book "Debt: the first 5,000 years." Reviewers note the citations are sometimes sloppy or even misleading, and the closer he gets to modern history the more likely Graeber is to make factual claims that are simply false.
As for the question of captive assimilation, it's complicated, and other flairs can address it better. I would say Graeber's claim is fairly out of step with the consensus.
Just to elaborate a bit, Graeber and Wengrow's claim was criticized by Daniel Immerwahr in The Nation, who said that the 1977 study by Heard actually argues the opposite. In response, Wengrow responded on Twitter with a lengthy breakdown of the study in question and why (according to him) it supports his argument.