I was listening to the score from “Dances With Wolves” (awesome), and got to wondering: have there been any real cases of wetern people adopting an aboriginal lifestyle? In DWW, the army officer gets into the indian lifestyle, marries a woman, and eventually severs all his ties to his previous life. Has this ever been done? I cannot imagine a literate person being satisfied by the nomadic lifestyle of the native Lakota Souix people-plus, life gets pretty tough when you get older.
Anyone know about a good case to read up on?
Well, the mutineers on the Bounty went to Pitcairn Island and their descendants are still there. Does that count? It wasn’t just one guy, so I guess it’s more like a conquering community.
Oh yeah, it happened. Happened both ways, really. I can’t give a specific instance, because in many cases nobody really bothered to do anything more than mention “A couple peope went off and hung out with the Indians for a while. Maybe they’ll be back. Or not.” Not so much the plains Indians, but the Pilgrims complained about some of their people wandering off with the locals. it definitely happene din South America now and then.
Part of the reason was that, presumably due in large part to disease, fish and game and forage were much greater than the population of native Americans required at the time. Life was pretty darn easy - if you weren’t catching pneumonia and keeling over dead.
You’d be surprised what you can get used to. Life consists mostly of family, work, and religion. Things like running water and good books are surprisingly secondary when it comes down to it. And these societies may even have advantages. There are a million pleasures I miss from Africa- falling asleep on my outdoor bed, the simple joy of a bucket bath in the sun with the mountains all around me, my friends, getting dolled up for market day…
An interesting book with a “gone native” theme is Sky Burial. In this book a young Chinese woman ventures into Tibet to find out what happened to her husband during WWII. She ends up basically stranded, and is taken in by a nomadic Tibetan family. She spends a good amount of time (a decade?) with them. When she finally does return to civilization she finds that China had changed beyond recognition.
There is another interesting book, whose name escapes me, where a Western woman falls in love with an Indian opium addict. She follows him to his village and ended up with no money. She spent a good amount of time living in very undeveloped village conditions.
Another example- I knew a Cameroonian man who went to live with the pygmies for several years. He left a recognizably modern life to live with nomads in the forest. He learned their herbal healing techniques and returned to civilization to become a traditional healer (and one of my language teachers.) So “going native” doesn’t always involve white people.
Out in distant corners of the globe there are countless westerners who have ended up in some strange situation and end up living permanently on the level of the villagers they live with. Usually this involves love. Sometimes it also involves some crazy. Sometimes it’s a mixed lifestyle- their family will split their time between the two cultures. Or it’s a missionary situation, where they have some- often minimal- outside support. Back in the day, of course, missionaries in remote places did have to grow their own crops, etc. and were pretty much in the same boat as everyone else.
Cynthia Ann Parker, Quanah Parker’s mother.
Well, this may not be the type of example the OP wants but…
Some have speculated that John Wayne’s classic “The Searchers” was based on the real life case of Cynthia Ann Parker:
Like Wayne’s niece, Cynthia was captured by Commanche warriors as a young girl, and was raised as an Indian. She learned to love her new “family,” and by the time she reached adulthood, she regarded herself as a Commance, and most definitely did NOT want to be “rescued.”
But “rescued” she was, as an adult, and she fought all attempts to reintegrate her into white society.
Grey Owl - born Archibald Belaney in England; emigrated to Canada and assumed an Indian identity; lived in the north country and wrote extensively on conservation; not found to be an Englishman until after his death.
Similar to Cynthia Ann Parker is Simon Girty. He and his brothers were captured by Senecas as kids and figured in the American Revolution and had dealings with Daniel Boone. They didn’t really “go native” in the OPs sense of choosing the native life. But they resisted becoming white and stayed native even though they had complete freeedom to go back to the white life.
Daniel Boone was often accused of going native by his critics. He was captured and then adopted by a chief called Blackfish. Boone was quite cheerful and accepting of his situation. But he made sure to excape when he could and later defended white forts against his adopted father. So he could be said to love the Native life even though he was loyal to the whites.
This was common in the Pacific Islands. In particular there were the Pakeha-Maori in New Zealand (“Pakeha” being the word for white person in Maori:
Gerónimo de Aguilar and Gonzalo Guerrero, who Hernan Cortes encountered when he came to Mexico at Cozumel, an island off the coast of the Yucatan. They were survivors of a shipwreck. Guerrero supposedly was well-established with the Mayas, having a wife and children. Aguilar joined Cortes on his expedition.
Herman Lehmann comes to mind, although he was initially captured as a teenager, not going native wilfully.
A friend of mine, a scholar who’s studied Native Americans since the early '70’s, told me once there have been whites living as Indians from the 15th century on. Some 17th century settlers on the East Coast quickly went native, causing friction in the Puritan circles. Even one of Geronimo’s father-in-laws was white, according to my source. Can’t give you references, though.
That was my first thought but considering the life on a ship versus what looks like paradise I don’t think that’s a backward move.
In1527 a Spanish expedition was wrecked near the coast of Florida and Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and another three men lived for eight years among several different native tribes. They were prisoners, traders, healers, etc. They started out near what is now Galveston and treveled through Texas and northern Mexico until they met with more Spaniards.
American Sidney Rittenberg, author of the utterly fascinating The Man Who Stayed Behind, lived in China for more than thirty years and became one of the few western fully-fledged Chinese citizens under Mao, with whom he worked for a time, and essentially was a Chinese Communist apparatchik.
Did they actually “go native” or just adopt native customs when they had to, keeping English customs (language, for instance) when they could?
What about the Métis? An entire nation based on intermarriage between the French and native Americans.
And I was just reading in 1423 the theory that the Chinese attempted to plant colonies in America, and they didn’t survive as separate entities until the Europeans arrived en masse, so essentially, if that is true, they went native.
Was that group living as “natives”?
Very few historians would say this is true. I’ve never seen any concrete evidence that the Chinese reached the Americas-- it’s all speculation. Nothing at all like the clear evidence that Vikings landed in North America.