The journalist Sebastian Younger in his book Tribe tells the story of an odd phenomenon

in early American history.

In the 18th century up and down the eastern seaboard you had two groups of people living

side by side.

You had the indigenous people living the way they did 15,000 years ago in the Stone Age,

really no different.

And then you had the colonists white for the most part, British, who were living at the apex

of Western civilization.

And a number of colonists began to defect to go and live among the indigenous people,

but the odd thing was, and here's the phenomenon, the traffic only went one way.

We have no records, and it could be a thing, but we have no records of indigenous people

of their own free will coming to live with the colonists.

Benjamin Franklin, in a letter to a friend in 1753, said of colonists who were captured

in a raid and then were later saved and brought back to the colony, quote, though ransomed

by their friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them, to stay among

the English, yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life and take

the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods.

Or take a look at this from the French emigrate Hector Trevacare in a book from 1782.

And his language here is not PC, but it's hundreds of years old.

The importance of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those

aborigines having from choice become European, and then listen to his interpretation.

There must be in their social bond something singularly captivating and far superior to

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