Do you want to lose (most of) your culture, adapt the newcomers' way of doing things and have a chance of competing with them economically?
Do you think this is an option that was meaningfully available to Native Americans in the early 19th century?
Hard to say. Consider the Cherokee Indians, who made a quite valiant attempt to 'close the gap', settling and inventing a written script and everything, only for things to go pear-shaped. But on the other hand, the Cherokee still seem to be around as a bunch of coherent groups, which is more than a lot of Native Americans from that time period could say.
Previous open thread
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