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Comment by schainks | Hacker News Reader

> For all the talk of gross national happiness, it's hard to imagine a young person feeling happy in a poor country with very limited opportunities for upward mobility.

The early North American colonists had the same outlook about life among the Native Americans. However, is never a _single_ instance of a Native American running away from their tribe to join the colonists, but colonist defections to the tribes were a common occurrence, more among women than men.

Why? For all that talk of "upward social mobility and a better life", people figured out the Native Americans were _happy_ living in harmony with nature, and the women who escaped realized they had more personal freedoms with the "savages" versus the high-and-mighty Europeans who sold them on the good life at the colonies.

Upward mobility and money still aren't everything, despite the pressure those forces put on the world to appear so.

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> However, (there) is never a _single_ instance of a Native American running away from their tribe to join the colonists

I have heard and quoted this for years, but I'm actually questioning whether it is true now. It just seems unbelievable when you think about it, and sort of feeds the "noble savage" trope. Out of hundreds of thousands or millions of Native Americans, there MUST have been some youth, at least one, seduced by the promised of western culture and voluntarily left their tribe and moved to a city or something. It just makes for a better story the other way around. Whether this was documented is another matter I guess.

It's worth reading "1491 (Second Edition): New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" by Charles C Mann if you have the time.

https://www.amazon.com/1491-Second-Revelations-Americas-Colu...

What happened is that European disease created massive pandemics that killed most of the American Indians. No one was seduced by western culture, because, in general, American Indians had a better standard of living than the European colonists.

Where I live, (in Massachusetts,) the remaining American Indians integrated into European settlements because so few of them were left. I know its different elsewhere in the American continents; you can find out more if you read 1491 and its sequel 1493.

There are indeed such instances.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samson_Occom The first indigenous Presbyterian minister

Here's another: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Colbert A native American fought for Andrew Jackson and eventurally retired and set up a cotton plantation.

I believe Don C. Talayesva went to the colonist world, then came back to his village.

He wrote Sun Chief, an autobiography which is a fascinating, candid and surprisingly easy read. Higly recommend!

https://archive.org/details/sunchiefautobiog0000tala/page/n6...

There are multiple primary sources cited in Tribe (http://www.sebastianjunger.com/tribe-by-sebastian-junger).

Among the first things western men did native peoples was rape the women and spread disease. Word spreads fast when it comes to those things.

Also, Captain Cook documented problems with his men raping and spreading disease on _all_ his travels. He lamented he did not have the power to control his men, and weighed disciplining them against facing a mutiny half a world away from a court that could do anything about it.

> However, is never a _single_ instance of a Native American running away from their tribe to join the colonists, but colonist defections to the tribes were a common occurrence, more among women than men.

There are many such instances, most famously Pocahontas. As far back as the 1600s there are records of Native Americans studying at Harvard. We just don't typically frame integration into the culture and institutions of a colonial power as "running away".

There are, however, instances of entire Native tribes adopting settled agrarian economies, developing written languages, and largely adopting European civilization: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee

The Native Americans weren't ignorant of the advantages the European settlers possessed, and many did attempt to reform their societies along European grounds. They just tended to do this as a society-wide endeavor, rather than individual people running away to live with colonists.

This description leaves out the why. Why did the tribes start adopting these ways of life?

The wiki link itself talks about how they continuously had their land stolen, the deer population they hunted for food was almost made extinct by the colonists, and a general attempt to claim ownership and sovereignty over their land in a way that was in line with how the European powers viewed ownership.

> attempt to reform their societies along European grounds

well, yeah, they had their land forcibly taken away from them so had to change their way of life

it's also unclear how much some of the social structural changes by the Cherokee was by choice or pressure from invaders to become "civilized" (i.e., pyramidical government structures, individual land ownership, etc.)

there's no indication that, generally speaking, Native Americans saw European societies as a "better life" -- in fact, quite the contrary. More powerful technologically and militarily, yes, but that's a separate matter altogether.

In the 1600s, English settlers and native Americans probably had similar standards of living (i.e. a bit above subsistence). Maybe a 2x difference which I'm not sure would have been in favor of the Europeans, given that the natives had had so much time to learn how to farm, fish, hunt, and forage in the area.

Bhutan vs the West is a huge difference in comparison.

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