Indigenous survival required a culture of resistance that blended assimilation and defiance.

Evidence

There is always a hard core of resistance in that process, but the culture of resistance also includes accommodations to the colonizing social order, including absorbing Christianity into already existing religious practices, using the colonizer’s language, and intermarrying with settlers and, more importantly, with other oppressed groups, such as escaped African slaves. Without the culture of resistance, surviving Indigenous peoples under US colonization would have been eliminated through individual assimilation. — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the…, 189

Categorization

• XREF: Reframes ‘assimilation’ as a survival strategy rather than a loss — connects to debates about cultural loss vs adaptation. — connects to: European colonization triggered demographic collapse and forced removal that shattered existing Indigenous societies — The Social Consequences of Colonialism; A people’s survival in struggle depends on its own cultural terms, not borrowed abstractions — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 106; Colonialist attacks on a custom create the native resistance that sustains it (+5 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the…, 189

Broader Connections

• African resistance to Christianity took traditionalist, radicalized, and modified forms. #exemplifies (0.82) — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 162
• African culture formed a shared shield against dehumanization in the New World #exemplifies (0.80)
• Colonized revolt springs from suffocation, not from rediscovered culture #contradicts (0.78) — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 831
• Black survival in struggle requires self-defined culture and consciousness, not imported theory #qualifies (0.75)