When the Europeans invaded the Native Americans something very similar to this happened. The Europeans demanded a single person with which to negotiate, but that kind of hierarchy was alien to them, so the tribes had to select "chiefs" ad-hoc to serve as their representatives.
One of my favorite facts is that Sitting Bull's headdress was composed of feathers that had each been given to him by a different warrior of the Lakota Tribe. It was a physical manifestation of the trust that his people had placed with him.
Damn that's interesting, got any reading material or podcasts on the subject?
I'm like 60% I learned that stuff from this episode of RevLeft radio, but it's been a long time.
Nice thanks just the title has got my attention already. One of my best friends is Lakota and my stepdad is Navajo, so learning about their history from anything outside an imperialist perspective is always super interesting to me.
James c scott wrote about this as a general condition of empire. Applicable from the Roman relationship with barbarians to modernity. You can even place the contemporary extractivist policies practised in the thirld world in that framework.
Should be worth noting that the Aztec and Inca Empires collapsed rather suddenly, while the northern tribal communities endured for centuries longer.
Of course, the native tribes also ended up getting turned on one another through much of the early conflict, with France and England effectively playing both ends against the middle by arming and instigating tribal wars over territory. In much the same way that modern western policy revolves around pitting Sunni against Shia in the Middle East and Hindu against Muslim along the Pacific Rim and conservative against liberal throughout the imperial core, it has been the people turned against themselves that consistently prove the most effective assets in capitalist dominion.
You don't get to wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart chucked a scimitar at you!
:posad: Good, you passed the test. Now show us the capitalist holdouts and we'll show you our warp drives.
