In this collection of essays, Americanists from the United States, Germany, and Latvia enter the scholarly debate about the ever increasing pluralization of societies on the North American continent by correlating the issues of multiculturalism and ethnic survival. Spanning six centuries and covering the cultural work and literary representation of eight ethnic groups in the USA and Canada, the essays demonstrate that the scope of the debate has to be widened to reflect the complexity of a subject which has too long been reduced to convenient but simplistic binaries.