I'm from New Zealand, I don't need to look that far.
We have far too many plonkers who like to claim that "Without colonisation, Māori would still be stone age cannibals" which ignores literally all of the recorded history of Māori interactions with Europeans.
(When Captain Cook turned up to "discover" New Zealand, he was surprised that the Māori he met wanted to trade food / cloth / pounamu for iron, especially nails, they were great for bird trapping and fishing hooks.)
Or the ol classic "Give us back the blankets and KFC, and we'll give you back your land" attempt at a joke.
It’s been a while since I read Cook, and I’ve read lots of similar literature, but can you point me to where exactly he is surprised by wanting to trade for metal? It seems more surprising he’d be surprised since natives everywhere had always wanted to trade for metals, guns, horses, etc. There’s no reason to believe that Māori cultural practices like cannibalism would have changed because they had interest in metals, either way, the things are totally orthogonal; but surely, as you say, the material culture would have changed through trade if nothing else.
In general, I think we need to get rid of the word “indigenous” altogether and find some other way to talk about situations like this. Nobody rose up out of the dirt, human migration and displacement has been a continual fact of human existence. Very often the people claimed to be “first” and therefore to have special privilege we have good reason to believe were not - and often “indigenous” peoples are shutting down archeological research because it contradicts their narratives. This is obviously bad for science, and it’s happened because we’ve privileged this narrative of colonials vs indigenous peoples rather than waves of migrations. The Māori are actually a rare example where the current evidence is they were “first”, but we also can’t expect any evidence that may be discovered to be taken seriously because of the political implications. Either way, I don’t believe and don’t accept that planting the Māori flag in the 1300s makes New Zealand theirs. It’s not. Current debates are simply the same old story of war and conquest, just pursued by other means since obviously the military route is unavailable to the modern Māori. That is, it’s simply the rationalization for a power struggle. The actual arguments are pontless: you can usually always go further back (eg, in America, why would we restore the Rushmore lands to the Lakota, who claim it, but who had very recently taken it by force?), and there is no longer any way to correct perceived injustices: all the “victims” are long dead and so are the “perpetrators” and in all cases there’s been intermixing in the time since and other immigrations. You’d simply be punishing people who had nothing to do with it and privileging people arbitrarily.
