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?
How should people facing colonization act to avoid cultural and economic subjugation?
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.
None of that will stop them dying like flies to smallpox.
Oh and also, giving up traditional ways of life to live like the Americans didn’t work out so well for some of the Cherokee. They played by all the rules, but as soon as prospectors found gold on their land they were pushed aside.
Strikes me that adopting Western customs and technology (such as the smallpox vaccine, Jenner, 1798) would have been exactly the right solution to that issue too.
As for the Cherokee—I agree they tried. But they were still too weak to stand up for themselves. My suggestion is not “play by the white man’s rules and hope he treats you nicely.” It’s “copy the white man’s ways so you have the strength to resist him.”
Huh, I didn’t know the smallpox vaccine came about that early.
Either way, there were still plenty of nasty diseases from the Old World that had (or still have) no vaccines, like cholera, typhus, typhoid, measles, malaria, influenza, leprosy and bubonic plague. Their cumulative effect sapped native societies of their vigor, and this would have persisted even if they adopted the kind of sanitation technologies that Euros brought.
The reason it took Europeans until the 19th century to conquer the African interior was that disease was so difficult to overcome. Until quinine was developed, the half-life of a British garrison on the Gold Coast was less than 18 months. With this severe a disadvantage, I don’t think there’s anything the native Americans could have done, no matter how enlightened their chieftains.
The most successful tribe at adapting to the conditions of European settlement were the Comanches, who dominated a huge region of the west for about 100 years.
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.
I deliberately gave the “if you were a chieftain” example because spontaneous reorganization is almost as difficult as making your enemies spontaneously nicer.
Also there are examples from history of colonized people who suffered less than others.
I deliberately gave the “if you were a chieftain” example because spontaneous reorganization is almost as difficult as making your enemies spontaneously nicer.
And I deliberately gave the example of Japan. I don’t know enough about Native Americans to say exactly how I’d go about the equivalent of a Meiji Restoration, but that’s what I would attempt. I’d pass laws mandating compulsory Westernisation, forcibly settle the nomadic peoples, do my best to Christianise the country, and try and import as much technology and Western practices as I possibly could. And naturally I’d try and crush my rivals to make sure there was no alternative plan. I’d have tried to make Western contact as much of an opportunity as possible—Western imperialism was the best thing that ever happened to the country my family are from.
Also there are examples from history of colonized people who suffered less than others
Definitely so. The ones who suffered less are generally the ones who adapted. There is no alternate history where a nation of nomadic hunter-gatherers are wandering the Great Plains hunting buffalo in 2014. And frankly that would have been a pretty miserable outcome even from the Native Americans’ perspective. Unfortunately, it’s that rather romantic vision that inspires, rather than a more pragmatic one of a rich and populous Native American nation, but which is culturally not much different from its “American” neighbours.
I don’t know enough about Native Americans to say exactly how I’d go about the equivalent of a Meiji Restoration, but that’s what I would attempt.
Then Japanese were much more similar to the Europeans then Native Americans. For starters they had a government. Furthermore, they had developed some institutions that were similar to western institutions, or at least more similar than anything else outside the West.
If you want to give an example of successful Westernization, Japan is a terrible example.
In the 17th century, the Dutch broke the commercial monopoly the Portuguese had over Japan, and the infighting between Dutch and Portuguese bothered the Japanese so much that they closed off the country. Only the Dutch (who had the wisdom to never use missionaries) were allowed to keep trading, and only through one port in one island.
Fast forward to Commodore Perry and his gunboat diplomacy. Panicked, the Japanese quickly copied the ways of the West, including the industrial revolution and the German education system, and by the next century they had become an imperialistic oppressor over much of East Asia. It took WW2 to put a stop to that. Then the Americans took charge of ruling the country until it didn’t appear to be a threat anymore.
During the 1980′s it seemed Japan was headed for big things, but they didn’t know what to do with that promise. Maybe they panicked again. Now Japan is a toothless beast, unsure of its future, economically uncertain (still the world’s 3rd, but stagnant), and demographically doomed.
I was tempted to give Siam as a successful example instead, if only because they managed to never be colonized, but right now they’re such a political joke that my first impression on this matter stands: there’s no way colonization can end well.
I am confused as to why your potted history indicates that Meiji Japan is a bad example of successful westernisation.
On first contact, Japan unwisely attempts to shut out the Westerners, and stagnates for centuries, leading to the humiliation of Bakumatsu. This could easily have ended in the destruction of the Japanese nation; not copying the West was a disaster.
Seeing the need to avoid that fate, the Japanese showed the flexibility and wisdom to reform their nation. They quickly copied the ways of the West, which was a roaring success for Japan; they not only avoided destruction, but managed to defeat Western powers (e.g. Russo-Japanese war). Yes, they became an “imperialistic oppressor” (your words) to their neighbours. So what? The question is how should a people facing colonization act, not how should their neighbours hope they act.
Despite the destruction of WW2, Japan quickly rebounded, becoming even more Western, and even more successful. Yes, things aren’t perfect, no, they aren’t doomed, they are one of the richest and most successful countries in the world. The Cree Nation would kill to have their problems.
I was tempted to give Siam as a successful example instead, if only because they managed to never be colonized,
The reason Siam was never colonized was that it served as a buffer state between British Burma and French Indo-China. This suggests another method to avoid colonization. Play rival would-be colonizers against each other.
America circa 1800 is a hard problem, even by the standards of cultures facing colonization. The colonial aspect usually gets emphasized when people talk about that part of history, and not without reason—the US and the Spanish at the time did behave appallingly badly. But it wasn’t the only issue that Native Americans then were facing, not by a long shot. Disease and its social fallout had mangled the American interior’s existing social organization quite effectively before any of the people involved had met a European other than the occasional explorer or scout (see for example the Mississippian culture), and the asymmetrical spread of technology (especially the horse, which I think we can file under “technology” if you turn your head and squint) arrived to stir things up just about when the whole exotic disease thing started getting under control.
If we took Europeans off the continent in 1800, those issues would probably have sorted themselves out after a few decades of confusion. But they’re more than enough to make mounting any kind of concerted response much, much harder.
How should people facing colonization act to avoid cultural and economic subjugation?
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.
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.
North American Indians were nearly all hunter-gatherers or pastoralists...
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.
both the Great Basin area and the American East and Southeast hosted fairly well-developed sedentary agricultural civilizations until European contact.
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.
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.
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.
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...).
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.
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.
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.
Safest? How is genocide from forced labor, forced displacement and lack of immunity to foreign diseases, plus the deliberate and/or negligent destruction of irreplaceable historical monuments and cultural artifacts, in any conceivable way the safest route?
Your profile says you live in France, presumably born there. You seem to have little personal experience of the receiving side of colonization. Short version: it’s not pretty.
Sure, bring me all the antibiotics and ebooks you wish to donate, but if you want to extract the ore I’m sitting on, I’d feel much safer if you don’t kill me, claim ownership, and build a city over my grave. Being outclassed economically is worth keeping my neck any day.
I think you’ve misinterpreted the choice Emile is describing. The choice isn’t between being colonized or not, the choice is what to do while you haven’t been colonized but there’s an empire nearby who might (and let’s face it probably will) decide to colonize you soon. His “first path” would be something like Meiji Japan, as others have discussed in this thread.
More broadly, my point is that treating culture as a Sacred Value That Must Not Be Compromised risks leading to suboptimal decisions, and that in a lot of cases, compromising culture is pretty okay (especially if you can reinvent it). Unlike being outgunned and outnumbered and sitting on a ressource everybody wants, how one thinks about culture is something the hypothetical Chieftain can control.
Some cultures are backwards, disfunctional or parasitic, and their loss is not worth mourning.
‘backward’ and ‘dysfunctional’ depend on context; social orders that have persisted for centuries usually have important characteristics that have contributed to the group’s survival. I recommend reading Eliezer’s metaethics sequence: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Metaethics_sequence
How should people facing colonization act to avoid cultural and economic subjugation?
You need either guns or money, preferably both, preferably as much as possible.
suppose you were transported back to America circa 1800 as a respected chieftain
I don’t think a single chieftain could change much. But my best bet would be on trying to create a viable country—probably on lands that the white colonists don’t want. Likely outcome—you die defending it.
How should people facing colonization act to avoid cultural and economic subjugation?
Join a different culture.
I’ve always admired the immigrants to the US who were emigrants from relatively oppressed countries. Some of them were pretty happy to join US culture, others thought they could preserve their former cultures while here, but their children drifted over anyway.
Maybe it is environmental, or maybe I am missing some common gene, but I have never had any interest in preserving the culture of my forefather’s in any sense in which it was not a winning culture.
It mostly depends on how the culture you want to join perceives identity
I disagree—humans, in particular, adults, are not that malleable. Discarding your old identity is hard.
Of course, some cultures are more accepting of newcomers (e.g. US) and some less (e.g. Japan).
it’s easier to become American than to become Jewish.
I think of “Jewish” as mostly ethnicity (if you prefer, a particular gene pool) and somewhat culture. In that sense you cannot “become” Jewish. You probably mean “convert to Judaism”, though, and that’s not that hard to do. Judaism does not proselytize for historical reasons, but if you want to convert you can do so.
Yes, but “Jewish” is part of two different sets: one is “French, German, Italian, Jewish, …” and the other one is “Christian, Moslem, Jewish, …” and that gives rise to a lot of confusion.
That’s not always possible, especially if your phenotype doesn’t match.
Fer sure not always possible.
But if it is possible, that would be my recommendation. And in the modern world, we have tremendous existence proofs of world wide migration with immigrants from Africa and Asia (among other places) visibly succeeding in many places in Europe, the America’s, other parts of Asia, and Oceania.
In a situation of chaotic change and lack of knowledge, flexibility and quick responses to new information are key. A group or organization (not just a pre-industrial tribe) lacks precisely that, and has formal and informal group cohesion mechanisms that impede adaptation.
Therefore, I believe a good strategy would be to motivate and assist other Native Americans to leave their tribes, attempt to fare for their own (or for their familiy, warrior band or other small group) in a thousand different ways, and teach others their own solution(s) if it happens to work.
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?
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.
None of that will stop them dying like flies to smallpox.
Oh and also, giving up traditional ways of life to live like the Americans didn’t work out so well for some of the Cherokee. They played by all the rules, but as soon as prospectors found gold on their land they were pushed aside.
Strikes me that adopting Western customs and technology (such as the smallpox vaccine, Jenner, 1798) would have been exactly the right solution to that issue too.
As for the Cherokee—I agree they tried. But they were still too weak to stand up for themselves. My suggestion is not “play by the white man’s rules and hope he treats you nicely.” It’s “copy the white man’s ways so you have the strength to resist him.”
Huh, I didn’t know the smallpox vaccine came about that early.
Either way, there were still plenty of nasty diseases from the Old World that had (or still have) no vaccines, like cholera, typhus, typhoid, measles, malaria, influenza, leprosy and bubonic plague. Their cumulative effect sapped native societies of their vigor, and this would have persisted even if they adopted the kind of sanitation technologies that Euros brought.
The reason it took Europeans until the 19th century to conquer the African interior was that disease was so difficult to overcome. Until quinine was developed, the half-life of a British garrison on the Gold Coast was less than 18 months. With this severe a disadvantage, I don’t think there’s anything the native Americans could have done, no matter how enlightened their chieftains.
I’ve heard it went better for the Cherokee than for other tribes, which is why the Cherokee are the ones most people have heard of.
The most successful tribe at adapting to the conditions of European settlement were the Comanches, who dominated a huge region of the west for about 100 years.
Yes—compared to other tribes they did the best. But it’d be pretty depressing to be a chieftain in 1800 knowing that that’s the best you can do.
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.
I deliberately gave the “if you were a chieftain” example because spontaneous reorganization is almost as difficult as making your enemies spontaneously nicer.
Also there are examples from history of colonized people who suffered less than others.
And I deliberately gave the example of Japan. I don’t know enough about Native Americans to say exactly how I’d go about the equivalent of a Meiji Restoration, but that’s what I would attempt. I’d pass laws mandating compulsory Westernisation, forcibly settle the nomadic peoples, do my best to Christianise the country, and try and import as much technology and Western practices as I possibly could. And naturally I’d try and crush my rivals to make sure there was no alternative plan. I’d have tried to make Western contact as much of an opportunity as possible—Western imperialism was the best thing that ever happened to the country my family are from.
Definitely so. The ones who suffered less are generally the ones who adapted. There is no alternate history where a nation of nomadic hunter-gatherers are wandering the Great Plains hunting buffalo in 2014. And frankly that would have been a pretty miserable outcome even from the Native Americans’ perspective. Unfortunately, it’s that rather romantic vision that inspires, rather than a more pragmatic one of a rich and populous Native American nation, but which is culturally not much different from its “American” neighbours.
Then Japanese were much more similar to the Europeans then Native Americans. For starters they had a government. Furthermore, they had developed some institutions that were similar to western institutions, or at least more similar than anything else outside the West.
First you’d need to create a bureaucracy capable of enforcing laws.
If you want to give an example of successful Westernization, Japan is a terrible example.
In the 17th century, the Dutch broke the commercial monopoly the Portuguese had over Japan, and the infighting between Dutch and Portuguese bothered the Japanese so much that they closed off the country. Only the Dutch (who had the wisdom to never use missionaries) were allowed to keep trading, and only through one port in one island.
Fast forward to Commodore Perry and his gunboat diplomacy. Panicked, the Japanese quickly copied the ways of the West, including the industrial revolution and the German education system, and by the next century they had become an imperialistic oppressor over much of East Asia. It took WW2 to put a stop to that. Then the Americans took charge of ruling the country until it didn’t appear to be a threat anymore.
During the 1980′s it seemed Japan was headed for big things, but they didn’t know what to do with that promise. Maybe they panicked again. Now Japan is a toothless beast, unsure of its future, economically uncertain (still the world’s 3rd, but stagnant), and demographically doomed.
I was tempted to give Siam as a successful example instead, if only because they managed to never be colonized, but right now they’re such a political joke that my first impression on this matter stands: there’s no way colonization can end well.
I am confused as to why your potted history indicates that Meiji Japan is a bad example of successful westernisation.
On first contact, Japan unwisely attempts to shut out the Westerners, and stagnates for centuries, leading to the humiliation of Bakumatsu. This could easily have ended in the destruction of the Japanese nation; not copying the West was a disaster.
Seeing the need to avoid that fate, the Japanese showed the flexibility and wisdom to reform their nation. They quickly copied the ways of the West, which was a roaring success for Japan; they not only avoided destruction, but managed to defeat Western powers (e.g. Russo-Japanese war). Yes, they became an “imperialistic oppressor” (your words) to their neighbours. So what? The question is how should a people facing colonization act, not how should their neighbours hope they act.
Despite the destruction of WW2, Japan quickly rebounded, becoming even more Western, and even more successful. Yes, things aren’t perfect, no, they aren’t doomed, they are one of the richest and most successful countries in the world. The Cree Nation would kill to have their problems.
The reason Siam was never colonized was that it served as a buffer state between British Burma and French Indo-China. This suggests another method to avoid colonization. Play rival would-be colonizers against each other.
America circa 1800 is a hard problem, even by the standards of cultures facing colonization. The colonial aspect usually gets emphasized when people talk about that part of history, and not without reason—the US and the Spanish at the time did behave appallingly badly. But it wasn’t the only issue that Native Americans then were facing, not by a long shot. Disease and its social fallout had mangled the American interior’s existing social organization quite effectively before any of the people involved had met a European other than the occasional explorer or scout (see for example the Mississippian culture), and the asymmetrical spread of technology (especially the horse, which I think we can file under “technology” if you turn your head and squint) arrived to stir things up just about when the whole exotic disease thing started getting under control.
If we took Europeans off the continent in 1800, those issues would probably have sorted themselves out after a few decades of confusion. But they’re more than enough to make mounting any kind of concerted response much, much harder.
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.
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.
We’re talking about how to survive colonization, not how to build a society the values of which you approve of.
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.
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...).
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.
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.
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.
Safest? How is genocide from forced labor, forced displacement and lack of immunity to foreign diseases, plus the deliberate and/or negligent destruction of irreplaceable historical monuments and cultural artifacts, in any conceivable way the safest route?
Your profile says you live in France, presumably born there. You seem to have little personal experience of the receiving side of colonization. Short version: it’s not pretty.
Sure, bring me all the antibiotics and ebooks you wish to donate, but if you want to extract the ore I’m sitting on, I’d feel much safer if you don’t kill me, claim ownership, and build a city over my grave. Being outclassed economically is worth keeping my neck any day.
I think you’ve misinterpreted the choice Emile is describing. The choice isn’t between being colonized or not, the choice is what to do while you haven’t been colonized but there’s an empire nearby who might (and let’s face it probably will) decide to colonize you soon. His “first path” would be something like Meiji Japan, as others have discussed in this thread.
(Agreed).
More broadly, my point is that treating culture as a Sacred Value That Must Not Be Compromised risks leading to suboptimal decisions, and that in a lot of cases, compromising culture is pretty okay (especially if you can reinvent it). Unlike being outgunned and outnumbered and sitting on a ressource everybody wants, how one thinks about culture is something the hypothetical Chieftain can control.
‘backward’ and ‘dysfunctional’ depend on context; social orders that have persisted for centuries usually have important characteristics that have contributed to the group’s survival. I recommend reading Eliezer’s metaethics sequence: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Metaethics_sequence
You need either guns or money, preferably both, preferably as much as possible.
I don’t think a single chieftain could change much. But my best bet would be on trying to create a viable country—probably on lands that the white colonists don’t want. Likely outcome—you die defending it.
Join a different culture.
I’ve always admired the immigrants to the US who were emigrants from relatively oppressed countries. Some of them were pretty happy to join US culture, others thought they could preserve their former cultures while here, but their children drifted over anyway.
Maybe it is environmental, or maybe I am missing some common gene, but I have never had any interest in preserving the culture of my forefather’s in any sense in which it was not a winning culture.
That’s not always possible, especially if your phenotype doesn’t match.
It also depends on how do you perceive your identity and whether you can let go of old-culture values including, for example, your religion.
It mostly depends on how the culture you want to join perceives identity; it’s easier to become American than to become Jewish.
I disagree—humans, in particular, adults, are not that malleable. Discarding your old identity is hard.
Of course, some cultures are more accepting of newcomers (e.g. US) and some less (e.g. Japan).
I think of “Jewish” as mostly ethnicity (if you prefer, a particular gene pool) and somewhat culture. In that sense you cannot “become” Jewish. You probably mean “convert to Judaism”, though, and that’s not that hard to do. Judaism does not proselytize for historical reasons, but if you want to convert you can do so.
That also applies to some extent to most European nationalities.
Yes, but “Jewish” is part of two different sets: one is “French, German, Italian, Jewish, …” and the other one is “Christian, Moslem, Jewish, …” and that gives rise to a lot of confusion.
Fer sure not always possible.
But if it is possible, that would be my recommendation. And in the modern world, we have tremendous existence proofs of world wide migration with immigrants from Africa and Asia (among other places) visibly succeeding in many places in Europe, the America’s, other parts of Asia, and Oceania.
In a situation of chaotic change and lack of knowledge, flexibility and quick responses to new information are key. A group or organization (not just a pre-industrial tribe) lacks precisely that, and has formal and informal group cohesion mechanisms that impede adaptation.
Therefore, I believe a good strategy would be to motivate and assist other Native Americans to leave their tribes, attempt to fare for their own (or for their familiy, warrior band or other small group) in a thousand different ways, and teach others their own solution(s) if it happens to work.