Acculturation In American Culture

Throughout history, there have been many exploits of striping away the culture of numerous people. The act of modifying the culture of an individual or a group as a result of contact with a different culture is referred to as acculturation. The process results in having the individual acquire the culture of a specific society from early childhood. Furthermore resulting in the lost of culture for these people from a very young age. Diverse people in society can perform the act of acculturation in many different ways to influence the lives of numerous people in society. Multiple people throughout the generations have been affected by this process, resulting in profound negative effects on their ways of living and practicing their own culture.

Amongst these, indigenous people are directly influenced by poverty and the effects that are felt are related to acculturation. With the process of acculturation, indigenous people have lost their ways of achieving income. Due to acculturation, the traditional methods of trapping, hunting and fishing which are used to support the economical needs of aboriginal people, have been influenced and have an impact on their ability to generate revenues to support their families. Based on the First Nations Regional Longitudinal Health Survey " In the transition to settlement life, young males may have experienced the greatest acculturative stress due to the discrepancies between traditional male roles of hunter, provider, and band member and the limited economic and job opportunities of contemporary settlement life" (Aborginal Healing Foundation, p. 64, 2009). This demonstrates that from a young age, indigenous males have been affected by acculturation. This has had an immediate impact on their ability to generate income since their customary ways have been affected by acculturation. This results in poverty for the indigenous people, due to fact that they cannot practice their traditional ways used in their culture to allow them to achieve a reasonable level of economical stability. Poverty is linked with suicide for many indigenous people. Without the ability to generate a stable income, referred to as poverty, suicide becomes a major factor in many indigenous communities. Based on a research conducted by Bagley (1991), it was concluded that suicide rates have been found to be strongly correlated with the percentage of population below the poverty level among aboriginal people in 26 reserves in Alberta. This concludes that there is a great amount of aboriginal communities that are clearly suffering of poverty and this is a contributing factor in the