Protecting Endangered Races
This guy invented the Toto script
In India there is a group of people called the Toto. They are a culturally distinct tribal group located in an enclave in the West Bengal region of India. The Toto people are considered to have mongoloid features. Mongoloid not as in someone with a mental deficiency, but rather someone with East Asian features.
Because they are on the border of Burma the Toto language is in the Tibeto-Burman family of the sub-Himalayan group. The language did not have and official writing system until 2015, when an elder of the tribe created one. Until then they would use the Bengali script. Being located in West Bengal, Bengali is used in schools, so they only use Toto at home. The Toto people used to be down to about 300 which is very low for human populations, but now they are up to around 1,500. Anthropologists agree that the Toto culture and language is totally unique to the tribe and therefore should be preserved.
The reason for this bounce back in population is due to the government safeguarding the area from outsiders flooding in. I think an important question to ask is if a government should protect certain races to stop their unique cultural identity from being destroyed. On one hand these kinds of people are a unique part of living history and standing by doing nothing while their way of life is eradicated sounds immoral. On the other hand treating people differently and giving certain privileges on the basis of race is the definition of racism. Some would also argue that certain groups going extinct is just the way nature works and we should not interfere with the natural course of things. The problem with this is that we do protect endangered animal species. And if people are more important than animals why wouldn't we do the same with people. Now I want to clarify that I don't think the government should mandate that endangered races must procreate with one another, but these kinds of laws allowing groups of people to live peacefully without the danger of being wiped out by some random group simply because there are way more of them seems morally good to me. If you disagree I respect your right to be wrong.
Moving on to a topic more close to home is the Ainu people. In case you didn't know there is an indigenous group of people known as the Ainu located in the Northern most part of Japan on the island of Hokkaido. Official reports say there are 25,000 Ainu left, but unofficial reports claim numbers as high as 200,000. There are also Ainu located outside of Japan inside Russia. Some are situated in the Kuril Islands(北方領土）which the southern part of the Sakhalin Oblast is claimed by Japan. The Ainu are a good example of cultural assimilation because most people have probably never met an Ainu in their life and those with Ainu heritage probably have no idea of it. This is because Japan had a lot of laws to force Ainu people off their land, therefore forcing them to give up their traditional way of life, laws to force Ainu children to attend Japanese language school to eradicate their language which was very effective, bringing the number of Ainu speakers down to 100 in 2008. There were also laws prohibiting the Ainu from practicing their traditional religion. Japan after about 500 years of assimilating the Ainu people into the Japanese identity, decided in 2019 to recognize the Ainu as an indigenous group of Japan.
So if you want to assimilate a culture, you need to destroy their language, their religion, their way of life, and make them believe they are of your culture. The most important reason you would want to assimilate a culture is because people naturally want to be ruled by someone of the same culture, therefore if they think themselves different then they would want to become independent, and that would be bad. This is also why in Russia they don't teach European as a race, they teach Eurasian ( Europe and Asia as one continent) because Russia has a large Asian population. Being able to control language is a very useful tool to eliminate independence movements or partisans.
In Turkey they have a large Kurdish population who want to become their own country which is why they are genocide them. Some would say it is morally wrong to assimilate a culture because you destroy them and replace their culture with your own, but the alternative is to kill them so I think it is fine.
So to answer the research question, yes you can assimilate a culture and the reason you don't hear about it is because they just become another culture. And I also believe that protecting endangered races is morally correct because the people are a living piece of history and just like animals it would be immoral to just let them die out because of human activity. Some would argue that having groups of people go extinct is just the way nature works and it would actually be immoral to intervene with the course of natural selection, but those groups of people would not be endangered if people didn't move into their areas and destroy their natural way of life.
Tarō Asō
“no other country but this one has lasted for as long as 2,000 years with one language, one ethnic group and one dynasty”.
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