* Anyone who’s served in the Army and Marines has met dozens of Natives. Modern Native culture is *INCREDIBLY* “little c” conservative. It’s almost amazing, it feels like you’re talking to a character reenactor “playing a 1950s guy”. They join the armed forces in vastly disproportionate numbers, they are genteel and polite to an almost fault, they still hold on to lofty American values almost everyone else abandoned. Every one, to a man, I met did an amazing job of simultaneously holding two identities, Tribal and American, without cognitive dissonance or (((loyalty problems))). And all of them, uniformly, believed that The White Man’s Science could co-exist with Native ways where possible but that deference should be afforded to White Man’s Science when they conflicted.
* From what I have read, the upper tier Indians left the reservations and rapidly dispersed into the larger population. I have one modern anecdote to support this. Back in the 1980s I had a co-worker who was born on a Mohawk reservation in New York. She was smart and socially aware enough to observe that all the girls got raped after puberty. So when she hit puberty she ran away from home and made her way to a social services office and got in foster care. She married a white guy and has a good life.
