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Emile comments on Open thread, 16-22 June 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Hard question:
How should people facing colonization act to avoid cultural and economic subjugation?
Let's give some hindsight benefit - suppose you were transported back to America circa 1800 as a respected chieftain, how could you act to minimize the horrible stuff that would happen to the Native Americans over the next 100 years? What's the best you could hope for given that you couldn't magically make the USA behave better?
Think hard and seriously about which of the two is worse.
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?
Or do you want to keep your culture, but be completely outclassed economically, and live at the whims of a more numerous and powerful neighbour?
Both ways include a risk of losing both anyway, but the first path looks the safest to me.
A bit as an aside, I don't think distinctive cultural identities is something that's inherently valuable to preserve. Some cultures are backwards, disfunctional or parasitic, and their loss is not worth mourning.
Meiji Japan which is a good example of adaptation-and-survival mentioned in this thread did NOT lose most of the traditional Japanese culture.
Agreed, though they did change a lot of their cutlure, and many prominent elements today were totally absent pre-Meiji. I don't know how much of today's Japanese culture someone from early 19th century Japan would recognize... (I'd guess, less than a European or American equivalent, but more than a Chinese equivalent, but I don't know enough to be sure...).
Pre-Meiji Japan was a large functioning literate sedentary agricultural civilization with a high average IQ. North American Indians were nearly all hunter-gatherers or pastoralists, did not have a tradition of literacy, had low population densities, and probably had a lower average IQ.
The Japanese had a big head start.
Not exactly. There were plenty of hunter-gatherers, but both the Great Basin area and the American East and Southeast hosted fairly well-developed sedentary agricultural civilizations until European contact. Both had been under climate stress at the time of contact with the Spanish, and the latter collapsed with the introduction of European diseases, but the descendants of both remained largely agricultural. Populations did crash pretty hard, though.
I am not an expert in the field, but a look at your Wiki links shows that both these civilizations basically collapsed before any significant contact with the Europeans for unrelated reasons.
The Southwest agricultural civilizations show a growth/decline cycle going back hundreds of years before contact; it's probably primarily climate-driven, although some features of the archaeological record suggest that warfare's been an issue too. European contact was just another decline, one that they managed to weather pretty well by Native American standards -- their successors are among the most intact native cultures.
The Mississippian culture didn't show that cycle, but it nonetheless was in decline for unrelated reasons at the time of contact (with Spanish explorers); smallpox and other diseases seem to have been the last proverbial nail in its coffin. Note that at that time, European diseases were spreading without direct European involvement: the culture never had any interchange with Europeans aside from the odd explorer, but it didn't need to. By the time the US reached its former territory, it had thoroughly collapsed, such that some of its successor tribes didn't even know why the mounds it's now known for were built.
The agricultural traditions associated with both did survive, which was my main point, although some Mississippian descendants seem to have contributed to Plains Indian culture later on. I wanted to say something about Eastern Woodland agriculture (as made famous by Squanto et al.) too, but it didn't fit well into my post and Wikipedia didn't have a good summary. In practical terms it would have been basically Mississippian.
Meiji Japan did lead to an authoritative, militaristic culture whose legacy includes WWII.
But also, there's a large difference between being targeted for economic subjugation only (as Japan was) and being targeted for territorial control (as in, imperial subject moving onto your land en masse), as the native Americans, native Australians, and Maori were.
Meiji Japan is overall a relative success story, but it depended on more favorable factors than just Meiji era policy.
Part of the reason Japan wasn't targeted for territorial control is that it was clear to everyone that Japan would be able to resist.
We're talking about how to survive colonization, not how to build a society the values of which you approve of.
Do you think this is an option that was meaningfully available to Native Americans in the early 19th century?
They definitely had the possibility to choose different strategies, some more or less like that, but the power imbalance was such that either way, the prospects were pretty bad.
Many nations facing colonization did attempt to adapt and fight. These attempts often ended in bloody wars and subjugation. The empires had enormous technological and military head starts.