In colonial eras, those who worked with the colonists, who worked with the (very successful and more advanced) invaders, tended to get highly preferential treatment.
Why is everyone and their cousin part Cherokee, and not part Aztec? Makes you wonder...
In Canada, you hear about the Metis, you hear about the Iroquois... Aaaaand maybe the Inuit in modern era. And they were just called "raw fish eaters" (eskimo) as a formal name for centuries. Many of the other dozens of tribes? Didn't work with the English OR the French. Got wiped out.
The natives who live in the cities, suburbs, even rurals, have jobs on par with anyone else, preferential tax treatment, and good societal standing. The ones who live on reservations... Don't. Well, they have the preferential tax treatment, but can't take advantage of it with no money anyways. Very unfortunate.
If someone invades my country, and their technology is so much greater than ours that it looks like magic to me, and they inform me that my beliefs are wrong, they have different ones, and look, empirically provably working magic weapons and magic medicine... I'm taking the magic.
Maybe it's the postmodernist indoctrination that hits us so hard in public schooling, but... "culture" isn't that important to me as a holistic concept, only as a set of values to be evaluated in positives and negatives. If there's a clearly superior culture, I'll adopt elements of it, especially if it is also the culture of an invading force. Ironic that postmodernist public schooling brings me to a decidedly anti-"woke" position of "F your cultural sensitivities, get colonized", but that is the logical conclusion of that indoctrinated viewpoint.
In colonial eras, those who worked with the colonists, who worked with the (very successful and more advanced) invaders, tended to get highly preferential treatment.
Why is everyone and their cousin part Cherokee, and not part Aztec? Makes you wonder...
In Canada, you hear about the Metis, you hear about the Iroquois... Aaaaand maybe the Inuit in modern era. And they were just called "raw fish eaters" (eskimo) as a formal name for centuries. Many of the other dozens of tribes? Didn't work with the English OR the French. Got wiped out.
The natives who live in the cities, suburbs, even rurals, have jobs on par with anyone else, preferential tax treatment, and good societal standing. The ones who live on reservations... Don't. Well, they have the preferential tax treatment, but can't take advantage of it with no money anyways. Very unfortunate.
If someone invades my country, and their technology is so much greater than ours that it looks like magic to me, and they inform me that my beliefs are wrong, they have different ones, and look, empirically provably working magic weapons and magic medicine... I'm taking the magic.
Maybe it's the postmodernist indoctrination that hits us so hard in public schooling, but... "culture" isn't that important to me as a holistic concept, only as a set of values to be evaluated in positives and negatives. If there's a clearly superior culture, I'll adopt elements of it, especially if it is also the culture of an invading force. Ironic that postmodernist public schooling brings me to a decidedly anti-"woke" position of "F your cultural sensitivities, get colonized", but that is the logical conclusion of that indoctrinated viewpoint.