The only solution is to get your birth rate up ..
I think Mq is right, even though it's chauvinistic to say so, some cultures have superior elements that become widely adapted.
Take the Phoenician alphabet, for example. Ancestor of Arabic, Greek, Latin (via the Old Italic alphabet), Cyrillic (via the Greek alphabet) and Hebrew (via Aramaic), says Wikipedia.
en.wikipedia.org
Take agriculture for another. Talk about a no-brainer, although it took us millions of years to figure it out, once we did, it spread like a virus.
Take computers and the internet for another. Wired has a fascinating article about autistic people that had been written off as retarded because they cannot communicate verbally, but they can communicate via computer.
wired.com
Once Maoris adopted reading and agriculture, they were, ipso facto, assimilated. The ones who didn't, well, they're marginalized.
I shouldn't speak about Maoris, I don't really know much about them. But I know a lot about native Americans.
Once they came in contact with Europeans, they gave up important elements of their own culture because they wanted Western goods. Metal ax instead of stone ax, wool blanket instead of skin, metal pot instead of clay pot. They couldn't make these goods, they had to trade for them, and they were, ipso facto, assimilated. They quit making stone axes, they quit making clay pots, they started hunting beavers so they had something to trade, and they killed each other over beaver trading grounds.
The English and the French, and to a lesser extent, the Dutch, pitted them against each other using trade goods (including guns and bullets) as an incentive, as the English and the French struggled for control of North America.
One of my lines of ancestry came from a French soldier who married a Chippewa woman. Their descendants killed Sioux for the US Army, and at least one traded away his people's land for money and a reservation. Pragmatic or traitorous, depends on the eye of the beholder. They stole it from the Sioux, the whites stole it from them. And now we're assimilated. |
