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.
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.