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knb comments on Open thread, 16-22 June 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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They ought to subjugate themselves, obviously!
Or, to be a little less flip; if you are facing such a fate, it is because your society is overwhelmingly weaker than its rivals. Yes, as Lumifer, below, suggests, the Native Americans needed weaponry, but it's hardly an accident that they lacked it - they weren't capable of manufacturing such things for themselves, or of producing anything of value to offer in exchange for the weaponry. As a result, they were forced to rely on the goodwill and charity of their neighbours, which is just as disastrous for nations as is it for individuals. Even if the USA had left the natives well alone, the Mexicans, or the French, or some other predatory nation would have wiped them out.
What the Native Americans needed to do was to reorganise their society, to give up their traditional way of life, to live in cities, to adopt the settlers' customs, laws, methods of production, and so on. See, for example, the example of Japan 60 years later.
The most successful example of Native American resistance against colonizers were the Comanches, who did pretty much the opposite of this. Instead of settling down, they shifted from being semi-sedentary to highly mobile. They did not practice agriculture or even animal husbandry. They foraged and lived off of seized livestock.
Adapting doesn't mean copying your enemy. When you copy from your enemies, best case scenario you become a match for them one-on-one. Realistically something is usually lost in translation when you copy, and it takes a long time to get up to speed. And in this case it was completely hopeless because Natives were much fewer in number and had various heritable vulnerabilities to disease and alcohol.
In other words, when things are asymmetric, you use asymmetric warfare.
In what sense were the Comanche the most successful? Yes, they caused the most problems for the USA, but that is looking at the issue through the wrong end of the telescope. The mark of success is how your own nation flourishes. We are supposed to be looking at this from the Native American perspective.
There are today more than twenty times as many Cherokee as Comanche. It's pretty clear which strategy was more effective.
You're just wrong that when things are asymmetric you should necessarily use asymmetric warfare. It's equally true that you should trade, using Ricardian comparative advantage. It is just this adversarial, warfare-based frame that I am trying to challenge.