As a point of comparison, North America has harsh winters that can be difficult to survive if one is unprepared. Many (a majority of?) early European colonists died within a year of arrival for this reason. Indigenous peoples were instrumental in their coming to understand the cultural and behavioral changes that needed to be made for Europeans to survive in America at the technological level they were at. This did not foster a communal spirit, however; the general rule seems to be that European diseases decimated Indigenous populations, and many (though not all) of the survivors were slaughtered in land disputes. Curiously, there are cases up and down the East Coast of European-Native American integration; it would be interesting to see why they were different, and where the tipping point between true communal integration and simple appopriation is when survival is on the line.
