Going Native / Real Life

Ancient history

• Alexander the Great caused controversy among his supporters and commanders for his attempts to assimilate into Persian, Egyptian, and other cultures and traditions. In Egypt, he considered Amun, or Ammon as an aspect of Zeus, and fused the two deites as Zeus-Ammon and worshipped the same. In Persia, he started gaining Persian titles such as Baseilus ton Baseileon (King of Kings, derived from the Persian Shahanshah) and he took this to the extent that he, offensive to the Macedonians and other Greeks, would promote Persian commanders on the basis of merits and insisted that in his Empire, Persians were subjects equal to Greeks and others. This completely clashed with the classically Greek Aristotelian ethos that barbarians could never be equal to Greeks, ironically even although Aristotle had been Alexander's own mentor.
  • Alexander's Macedonian and Greek generals who carved up his empire into their own personal kingdoms when he died embraced the local customs to varying extents. One of the most notable being Ptolemy I Soter, who declared himself Pharaoh of Egypt and founded the Ptolemaic dynasty of pharaohs, including the famous Cleopatra (Cleopatra VII Philopator).
• The 25th Dynasty of Ancient Egypt, colloquially referred to as the Black Pharaohs, was made up of Nubians who conquered Egypt near the end of the Third Intermediate Period. Like Alexander and Ptolemy before them they exhibited an unusual devotion to Egypt's religious, artistic, and literary traditions to the point that they established the first widespread construction of pyramids in centuries.
• Cultural exchange was usual between Phoenicia/Carthage and Hispania, to the point Spanish and Portuguese archaeologists often find it difficult to ascertain if cross-cultural findings were made by Punicized Hispanics or by Punic artisans adopting the local style of artwork.
• Among the many accusations made by Octavian's propaganda against his outlived-his-usefulness co-conspirator Mark Antony, the most effective was that Antony had "gone native" and was living like a Hellenist, an unforgivable crime to the proud and conservative Romans. The most damning thing, as far as the Romans were concerned, was the allegation that Antony had, on his own authority, held a triumphal march in Alexandria. This was Serious Business, since triumphal marches were supposed to celebrate the glory of Rome, that is, in Rome, and also needed to be approved by the Senate. This would eventually trigger "The final civil war of the The Roman Republic" and usher in the The Roman Empire after Antony and Cleopatra VII were defeated and driven to suicide.
• The Romans tried to Romanize many barbarian nations they subjugated, whereby they would take a few of the chieftains' sons as quasi-voluntary hostages, send them to Rome, and shower them with all the luxuries that the capital could offer. After being thoroughly schooled in the might and comfort of the Empire, they were sent home as loyal client kings. This backfired however, when one of them, Arminius, revolted against the Romans, and led the Germanic Tribes to inflict one of the worst defeats on the Empire, at the Battle of Teutoberg Forest.
  • Rome also encouraged this among tribes (even ones not yet conquered) who had useful military skills, particularly if those skills involved cavalry or archery (the Roman Legions were almost entirely infantry). Auxiliary soldiers recruited from such tribes would fight for Rome for 25 years, after which they and their children would become Roman citizens, with the expectation that they'd be thoroughly Romanized by that point. After a few examples of this backfiring with auxiliary units using what they'd learned of Roman tactics to stage revolts, the policy was modified so that auxiliaries would always be stationed far away from their home province to remove any such temptations (abolishing the auxiliaries altogether was impossible because they comprised a huge portion of Rome's fighting strength).
  • It's on record that when the Roman legions were finally ordered back to Rome to defend the capital of the collapsing empire a lot of them quietly deserted to stay with their families.
• The Lombards, who conquered Italy in the 6th century, adopted Roman culture to the point that not even the Lombard language was spoken by the 8th century.
• Same with the Manchus in China: they basically adopted Chinese culture and language, and even though many people in northern China claim to be ethnic Manchu, there are only about a dozen speakers of the Manchu language left.
• Bulgaria is named after the Bulgars, a group that started out ethnically Turkic or Indo-Iranian but merged with the Slavic population to the point where "Bulgar" and "Bulgaria" became something of an Artifact Title. This is in contrast with the lesser-known Volga Bulgaria in Russia, which maintained its Turkic identity until the Mongol conquest centuries later. Even today, Turkic ethnic groups (specifically Tatar and Chuvash people) constitute a majority in the Volga Bulgars' former lands.

Middle Ages to Early Modernity

• This trope seems to be endemic to any foreign invader who conquers Iran. In order: Alexander the Great went increasingly native and the Seleucid successor state was a Greco-Persian melange, the Muslim invasions ended with the House of Abassid going native, becoming Perso-Arabic and overthrowing the more Arab-supremacist Umayyad dynasty, the Seljuks and Khwarazmians went native and became Turko-Persian, the Ilkhanate went native and became Mongol-Persian, the Timurids went native and became Turko-Mongol-Persian, and finally the Safavids, Afsharids and Qajar dynasties were all one flavour or another of Turkic originally and ended up assimilating into Persian culture. Bottom line, Iran got invaded a lot but two generations later you wouldn't have known that the ruling house were originally foreigners.
• Not to outdo Iran, but a lot of the Muslim kingdoms of India also tended to established by assimilated foreign conquerors (mostly Turkic, but others also got their share). The last native empire of India, the Mughals, responsible for Taj Mahal and the proliferation of the Hindustani language, among other things, were originally an offshoot of the aforementioned Turko-Mongol Timurids.
• Many of the Norman families who settled in Ireland after the invasion of 1169 eventually became "Hiberniores Hibernicis ipsis"—more Irish than the Irish themselves—to the point where the government passed the Statutes of Kilkenny in 1367, which banned the "English" in Ireland from adopting Irish customs, in a failed attempt to halt the process. It's not only Ireland; this trope defines the Normans. Originally they were Vikings who settled in Northern France, enthusiastically adopting French and converting to Catholicism. Wherever they went the Norse conquered, and left their mark on the language and culture, before being absorbed and integrating into their new homes.
• Early in Russian history, the Nordic-descended nobility of the Kievan Rus' gradually assimilated into the local culture as the empire evolved into the Eastern Slavic countries we know and love today: Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. Scandinavian settler populations likewise went native in France (specifically Normandy — the word "Norman" derives from "Norseman"), Britain, and Ireland.
• The Magyarab people who live on the border between Egypt and Sudan are descended from 16th century Hungarian conscripts of the Ottoman Empire, which once encompassed both countries. Centuries of intermixing with Nubian women had made them separate from modern Magyars ethnically and linguistically (they are African-looking and speak Nubian Arabic, just like everyone else in the area), but to this day they and the people around them recognize that there is still something inherently foreign about them.
• Vlad the Impaler's younger brother Radu the Handsome spent his childhood alongside him in the Ottoman Empire, but unlike Vlad who always longed to return home, Radu ended up befriending Mehmed The Conqueror before becoming a leading figure of the Ottoman court and took part in The Fall of Constantinople.
• Steppe cultures like the Mongol Empire tend to do this whenever it forms an empire in settled lands. There are a number of reasons for this: the pasture is not suitable for their horses, the population of the conquered lands is too big to assimilate, the local culture is the only source of bureaucrats and siege engineers for further conquests, and the settled places are just plain rich and viands, concubines, and palaces are more fun than yurts. It is common though to maintain nominal deference to the Good Old Ways like building giant game preserves to hunt in or having horsetails as a flag.
  • As mentioned above, the Timurids did this twice: they were a Central Asian steppe empire that eventually assimilated into Persian culture in the 14th century, and then in the 16th century, a Timurid king conquered much of India, forming the Mughal Empire that assimilated into Indian culture.
  • Somewhat similar were the Magyar horsemen who settled into Eastern Europe. Their Hungarian descendants, while having long since adopted European customs and styles, still retain elements of their nomadic past, including their language.
• The Peranakan Chinese of South East Asia are typically descended from Chinese traders who settled in what was then the Spice Islands or the East Indies (Nanyang to the Chinese). After a few generations their customs and cuisine absorbed a lot of Malay influences, going native, although they do maintain distinct traditions based on their Chinese roots. Notably, this is in stark contrast to the later generation of Chinese immigrants to Malaya and Singapore that came during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who ended up maintaining their own distinct Chinese communities and languages to the present day due to colonial racial separation policies enforced by the British and the subsequent ethnic tension that would linger for decades.
• The Madurai Nayaks were of Telegu origin and had become Tamilized. After they took the throne of the Kingdom of Kandy, they also began speaking Sinhala and patronized the Buddhist sanghas (Buddhism being the majority religion among the Sinhala). The royal standard of the Kandy Nayaks was based on the ancient Sinhala flags which prominently featured the lion in reference the Sinhala myths claiming descent from a lion. This Nayak standard would come to form a large part of the post-independence Sri Lankan flag.
• The Byzantine Empire, formally known as the Eastern Roman Empire, adamantly held to being Roman. While Rome's eastern half always retained its Hellenistic heritage, as the centuries passed, the Empire embraced this aspect more and more, with the transition from Latin to Greek being just one example. This was cemented following the retaking of Constantinople in 1261 and the Byzantines referring to themselves as Hellenes instead of the traditional Romaioi - though this also had a lot to do with the considerable grudge felt towards westerners.

Spanish and Portuguese Empires

• In 1510, three Spanish expeditioners ended up taking refuge in the local tribe in modern day Panamá after the local governor, Diego de Nicuesa, made everybody's life hell. One of them, Juan Alonso, killed another in a swordfight for unknown reasons, and seeing him so strong, the indigenous chieftain Careta made him the leader of his royal guard. Turned into tribal warriors, Alonso and his remaining partner adopted the local language, customs and clothings and lived with them for a year until the arrival of Vasco Núñez de Balboa, providentially another enemy to Nicuesa. Diplomacy between the Spaniards and the indigenous turned difficult, and when Alonso secretly warned Balboa that Careta was not willing to listen, the explorer captured the chief in a shocking raid to ease the negotiations. Núñez and Careta made up with a common alliance against a rival tribe, to the point Balboa eventually married Careta's daughter, but Alonso was not so lucky and, upon being declared a traitor by the locals, had to return full time to the Spanish contingent. He became Balboa's second-in-command and advisor in indigenous affairs until being killed in action.
• A 1511 Spanish fleet shipwrecked in the coast of Yucatán, where most of the sailors and expeditioners were sacrificed and eaten by the local Mayans. The exceptions were Jerónimo de Aguilar and Gonzalo Guerrero, who managed to escape from the Mayan tribe that was going to sacrifice them, although only to fall in the hands of a tribe enemy to the first, who spared their life and kept them as slaves. Over time, the two learned the local languages and adopted their culture in order to survive, and they eventually became nice Mayan citizens in all but name. Aguilar was a Franciscan friar and kept celibate, even although the chief constantly offered him women, but Guerrero married a native woman and fathered three children, and eventually became a respected warrior. When Hernán Cortés arrived and contacted them in the search of guides of interpreters, Aguilar was overjoyed to return with the Christians, but Guerrero stayed due to his family and the belief that the Christians would not accept him back with all of his indigenous tattoos and marks, or so he claimed (Aguilar later confided that Guerrero had reportedly advised the natives to attack a Spanish expedition two years prior). Guerrero later fought on the indigenous side during the Spanish Conquest of the Maya, dying of an arquebus shot in 1536.
• Aleixo García, a Spanish sailor of Portuguese origin, was a member of a Spanish exploration fleet that was mauled by tribesmen in South America in 1516. Some survivors went north and managed to reach Portuguese waters, but García and a small group traveled inland and joined the local Guaraní tribes, learning their languages and culture. At the time, it was popular for Guaraníes to form hordes and attack the lands of the Inca Empire in the search of plunder, and when García heard tales about the fabulous riches of the empire, he and his mulatto partner Francisco Pacheco either joined or commanded one of those tribal enterprises in 1525. Although the Inca eventually drove them away, the Spanish-Guaraní army managed to defeat several Inca garrisons and escape with lots of silver and slaves, after which García reached the Spaniards living in the Atlantic coast to ask them to call home and request reinforcements. Before he could properly return, however, contact was lost with García and his people, with most local versions claiming they were attacked on the road by other tribes, perhaps Payaguás or rival Guaraníes, or alternately that the expeditioners killed each other for the booty. Anyway, the expedition attracted a lot of attention to the zone, although the name of García would be gradually forgotten (he apparently left a mestizo son also named Aleixo, but he was not noteworthy) and some years later it would be Francisco Pizarro who finished the job with the Incas from the Pacific coast.
• Tomé Pires was a Portuguese diplomat who formed part of the first western embassy to China since the 14th century in 1516. However, political intrigue by the deposed sultan of Malacca moved the Chinese to jail the ambassadors and execute most of them. Pires was one of the survivors, and according to some sources, he was left free on the condition to never leave China, eventually integrating into the local culture and marrying a wealthy Chinese woman whom he converted to Catholicism. Apparently the same happened with Vasco Calvo, an expeditioner who was imprisoned by the Chinese in a scuffle with a Portuguese embassy in 1521.
• Possibly an even more spectacular example was Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, who had to do this in order to survive when stranded during the Narváez Expedition to what's now the US Gulf Coast.
• Minor examples happened during the Spanish Conquest of the Aztec Empire, as the Spaniards adopted some local items, like the cotton armor named escaupil or ichcahuipilli, which was excellent to stop native weapons yet lighter than European armor, and the chimalli shield, smaller and more maneuverable. Cortés also borrowed native lances from his Chinantec allies, as they were also longer than European lances and did a great job stopping the cavalry of the rival conquistador Pánfilo de Narváez.
• Spaniards were often a bit too much open to intermarrying with the natives, something which the natives themselves promoted in order to practice useful Altar Diplomacy with the guys in charge, to the point that in some places, conquistadors adopted native customs like Polygamy behind the Catholic Church's back. The lands now known as Paraguay, back then governed by Domingo Martínez de Irala, were absolutely infamous for their settlers' penchant to acquire multiple native lovers each, with an indignant captain describing that every local Spaniard that had eight wives only was like that because he could not have sixteen (they even called it "Muhammad's Paradise" in reference to the Muslim polygamy).
• After the Spanish Conquest of the Inca Empire, the Spaniards initially tried to keep the Inca line of succession on its throne as a Puppet King, but they eventually abandoned the idea for being impractical and de-royalized the lineage, letting them retain their wealth and honors and giving them imperial jobs instead (the last prince, Carlos Inca, was made Mayor of Cusco rather than emperor). They commissioned a series of artistic works portraying the Inca lineage with the puppet emperors excised for decorum and Charles V and the Kings of Spain added after the last independent emperor, Atahualpa, effectively declaring the kings of Spain emperors of the Inca Empire as well. This notion, surprising as it may be, was not particularly contested by the locals, and was in fact a PR move — having an emperor-like figure on top, whoever he was, was Serious Business for the Inca (especially with a rebel emperor pretender still fighting in Vilcabamba), and Atahualpa had crammed enough regional enemies for the new lineages to be welcomed by many. After the wars of independence, Peruvian leaders issued similar works with themselves in the place of the monarchs.
• Matteo Ricci, Jesuit priest and missionary for the Portuguese, mastered the Chinese language (including its complicated writing system), wore Chinese robes and was the first Westerner to visit the Forbidden City.
• Hasekura Tsunenaga led an expedition to Spain in 1614 at the behest of Date Masamune on the European-styled ship San Juan Bautista/Date Maru. These explorations were the first Japan had ever made to explore the world and went to many Christian nations. Date was a patron of Japanese Christians, while Hasekura and many of the men who served under him as the ships crew were actually Christian. At least five of these crew members would opt to stay in Coria del Rio, a small town in Spain, rather than risk persecution and death as Christians in Japan. Many in the town today claim to be descendants of the crewmen, who have taken up the surname Japón (Japan), and a statue of Hasekura stands there.
• Prazeiros began as Portuguese who in the 1500s settled in the Zambezi Valley and were granted vast estates called "prazos" ruled in a semi-feudal manner. However, due to lack of Portuguese women and the decreased interest in settlement due to harsh tropical weather, the prazeiros increasingly intermarried with local Africans and adopted African culture.

British Empire

• William Adams also known as Miura Anjin, an English ship's pilot working for the Dutch who eventually became an adviser to Tokugawa Ieyasu and was responsible for setting up Dutch and English trading houses in Japan. He was officially made a samurai by Ieyasu and served as the inspiration for the Blackthorne character in Shogun.
• This was a constant theme in The British Empire, both in its fiction, and actual administrative concern:
  • While Victorian and Edwardian British administrators and soldiers in British India were very derogatory about the native culture —partly to justify their rule — —their 18th-century predecessors were much more complimentary — sometimes to the point of worshipfulness. The early years of the East India Company had many so-called "White Mughals" who adopted local customs and languages and marrying local women, and even took to Polygamy and conversion. (You can read about this in White Mughals by William Dalrymple; he says this was a time of widespread interracial sexual exploration, cultural assimilation and hybridity, and that nearly all Englishmen in India at that time did this.) The later Company generals nixed this hard, ostracizing many of these men. The British Raj and other colonies instituted a kind of apartheid to avoid mixing too much with the locals, or identifying with them too much. They also mandated that British children born in India return to boarding schools in England to reinforce their British roots and culture. The scions of interracial unions were never afforded this privilege and were consigned to Eurasian “ghettos”. But the "white Mughal" tradition lives in the plethora of words, items, habits and tropes in modern British culture that stem from Indian culture.^note Read A Little Princess with this in mind. Sara is described as having heavy, lustrous black hair and dark skin ("little brown hands"). Author Frances Burnett would have been aware of the existence of children like Noor un-Nissa, later known as Kitty Kirkpatrick, from these once-sanctioned unions. Sara, who is convinced she is a princess no matter what her circumstances, may well be the granddaughter of an actual Mughal princess.
  • The scions of these unions between Englishmen and Indian women would go on to form the now dwindling Anglo-Indian community in India.
  • Alexander Burns, a.k.a. Bukhara Burnes is a good complex example of this. As an officer employed by the EITC, he became renowned as a Bold Explorer, and spy, known for dressing in local Pashtun dresses, speaking their languages and understanding their customs. During his service in Afghanistan, Burnes kept insisting to his superiors that they respect the ruler Amir Dost Muhammad, but they ignored him and launched the disastrous Afghan expedition instead. Burnes supported this out of loyalty even if he disagreed with it, and he dissipated in service, spending his time seducing and sleeping with local women, much to the distaste of Afghanis. The First Anglo-Afghan War broke out when a rebel contingent attacked the area where Burnes and his soldiers were quartered, and he was brutally killed, and to this day, Afghanis consider Burnes (the man who tried his best to learn their ways, to oppose British expansion there) to be a villain, a snake-like figure who tried to be one of them and failed, and in Victorian fiction, Burnes became a primary exhibit on why going native was not recommended. Burnes inspired such works as Flashman, The Man Who Would be King and Kim among others.
  • T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), as an archaeologist in Arabia, went native long before the war. He was chosen as a liaison to the Arab rebels because he knew their ways so well and could speak most of their dialects. Particularly, he was one of the few British officers who didn't speak Arabic with an Egyptian dialect, which gained him the respect of the (peninsular) Arab leaders. He was sent to organize the Arabs against the Turks to weaken the German-Turkish-Austrian alliance but felt very conflicted about the whole process because he knew that the British and French were not going to keep their wartime promise of a free, united Arab state. He asked for a transfer to get out of leading a fake revolution—when his request was denied, he attempted to make the revolution successful enough to stick. He failed. After the war, he left Arabia for good, changed his name to Shaw, and joined the RAF as a mechanic, and lapsed into anonymity. The famous Biopic Lawrence of Arabia more or less dealt with his failure to fully cross the line.
• J. Hudson Taylor, a British missionary in China, wore Chinese clothing, wore his hair in the Manchu queue, and spoke Chinese to be able to be better accepted by the Chinese public.
• In reminiscence of a specific lord chancellor and archbishop of Canterbury who later paid for his switch with his life, going native in a particular institution has been described as the "Becket effect" by economists (Thomas à Becket started his political career as a thoroughly loyal pawn of Henry II and a party boy. After his ascension to the archbishopric he became one of the Catholic Church's main champions in England, and an ascetic to boot). Generally, whenever a (supposed) pawn of a national government gets into a position like the European Commission or the European Central Bank, he quickly becomes a man of the club and ceases to be the lackey of his "principal", much to the chagrin of their promoters.
• The Pakeha Māori of New Zealand, early 18th century European settlers who lived amongst the Māori. Some were taken as slaves, others (such as Frederick Edward Maning) lived with Māori voluntarily, often for trade or religious reasons. A very few even received moko.
• The escaped convict William Buckley (no, not that one) spent several years living among Aboriginal Australians. The Australian Slang term "Buckley's chance" ("close to no chance") comes from his name.

North America

• Starving settlers deserting to join better-fed Native communities was a major problem in many early North American settlements before Europeans learned basic New World survival skills. The famous and not at all mysterious disappearance of the Roanoke Colony was almost certainly a case of all the settlers joining the native community on nearby Croatoan Island. But stories of an entire colony vanishing from the face of the Earth were less problematic for the financial backers of the colonies than having it been known that settlers could just quit when things turned out harsher than expected. There is a project underway to demonstrate via DNA testing whether or not the settlers joined the local band.
• The Native American woman Pocahontas adopted Christianity and English customs after being abducted by the settlers of Jamestown.
• The French colonies in what are today Canada and the United States were an exercise in this, as the French, unlike the English, were more interested in exploiting Native American trade goods than in agricultural settlement. Many white fur trappers adopted native customs of dress, residence, and even face-painting, and took native wives. It was no small number, either. Over half a million Métis - people with mixed European/First Nations ancestry - currently live in Canada.
• Wherever there is a frontier there are instances of Going Native back and forth. If the original cultures are strikingly different this can lead to some weird-looking convolutions, like Indians with English names or fur hunters with Indian dress and Indian wives or mistresses.
• Adults abducted by Native Americans in war might be raped, enslaved, or killed, but children were likely to be reared as members of the tribe and assimilated. A classic case is that of Cynthia Anne Parker whose white family was massacred at Parker's Fort and became the mother of famed Comanche war-chief Quanah Parker. Some well-treated abductees refused to leave their new tribes when their families found them, because they really were happier in the tribe. (Cynthia was not at all happy about being "rescued", either; she tried to return to her Comanche family, but was re-captured by the Texas Rangers, and eventually died of influenza, completely brokenhearted).
  • During an attack that left their family dead, 14-year-old Olive Oatman and her 7-year-old sister Mary-Ann were abducted by Yavapai natives and made slaves. After a year they were traded to the Mohave and were eventually adopted into that tribe. They received traditional tribal tattoos (Olive would later be known as the Girl with the Blue Tattoo) The two were given their own clan name Oach and their own plot of land to farm. Olive was also named Aliutman or Ali and possibly referred to as Spantsa (Smelly Womb/Vagina) a bawdy nickname common among Mohave as a sign of affection, that possibly had sexual connotations leading historians to believe she may have been very sexually active. Some secondhand reports suggest Olive may have been married and birthed two children (mainly coming from friend Sarah Thompson claiming Olive had confessed to leaving behind her two children) something historians generally don't believe is true due to lack of evidence as the Mohave weren't known to have any biracial children present during and after Olive's departure. Sadly Mary Ann would later die of starvation which nearly killed Olive as well. By the time she was "ransomed" back to white society and her brother, who was left for dead during the attack, she was said to be so assimilated after four years with the Mohave that it was hard to even tell she was a white woman. She would spend the next 10 years traveling the country with minister Royal B. Stratton, insisting that she was an unwilling captive of the Mohave and that the tattoo marked her as a slave, likely due to Stratton's urging, and likely over fear of ostracism for fraternizing with savages. Stratton also ghostwrote her book which has been said to be filled with anti-Native fluff and half-truths. Its also been said that Olive suffered from depression and anxiety for the rest of her life. She was said to always keep a jar of hazelnuts to remind her of her time with the Mohave whom she considered family. All of these are signs of her full assimilation and the Mohave considering her one of their own.
  • Eunice Williams, the daughter of a Puritan minister, was adopted by a Catholic Mohawk tribe after she and her family were taken captive. The rest of the family was eventually freed, but the Mohawk refused to part with Eunice, who was no longer considered a prisoner but rather a member of the tribe and of her adoptive family. After Eunice became an adult, her family tried numerous times to convince her to come back, but Eunice, who had converted to Catholicism and married a Mohawk man, could not be persuaded; she agreed to keep in touch with her family and to visit on occasion, but refused to leave the life and community that had become hers.
  • Intermarriage could also be voluntary. People might marry for a term, then separate or stay together. Sometimes an Indian girl would live among the Anglos, then her Anglo husband would come back to the band with her. This intermarriage and cultural sharing was encouraged in some Plains nations because they believed the kids would inherit the best of both races. Mari Sandoz writes about this in her book Crazy Horse, Strange Man of the Lakhota.

18-19th century

• Catherine the Great. Born a German Lutheran, she converted to the Eastern Orthodox Church in order to marry the Russian crown prince. Once she seized the throne from her husband, she fully embraced her adopted nation, expanding the size, influence, and progress of Russia. Indeed the fact that she became a much more observant Russian Orthodox than her husband and also did more to honor the memory of his predecessor, Empress Elizabeth, was a far from unimportant factor in her gathering the support she needed to oust her husband in the first place. Catherine the Great ultimately became just as autocratic, reform-halting, serf-oppressing, Pole-slaughtering and expansionist as any Russian autocrat.
  • One of her favourites, Stanisław II Augustus (generally better known as Poniatowski), the last King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, is a complicated case. He started out part of a powerful Polish noble family, if associated with Russians early on, and sent to Russia as a young man where he met a young Catherine. They became lovers, and she connived to keep him at court (including, improbably, as the Ambassador from Saxony), while he ended up pushing pro-Russian policies in the Polish Sejm (a semi-democratic institution not unlike the Roman Senate), participated in a coup attempt against the Polish King, and then became Catherine's chosen successor to the throne. This unsurprisingly meant that he was felt to have gone Russian. But as King, he tried to reform the Polish-Lithuanian government into something efficient and modern and patronised Polish arts and culture, essentially preserving Polish national identity, and even creating the constitution of 1791 that would have made Poland into a constitutional monarchy on the English model. However, while he is generally considered to have done his best to oppose Catherine's efforts to dismantle Poland, making a valiant but doomed attempt to fight back in the Polish-Russian War of 1792 (doomed because Poland was skint and Prussia refused to help). Even after his abdication, he spent the rest of his life on a limited Russian pension campaigning for the Polish cause. So, he was a Pole who went native in Russia, then went native again back in Poland.
• When Napoléon Bonaparte conquered much of Europe, he put many of his brothers on the thrones of client kingdoms, seeking to establish an international Bonapartist dynasty rivaling that of the Habsburgs. This backfired when he made his younger brother Louis the King of Holland. Instead of acting as a Puppet King like he'd hoped, Louis made genuine attempts to care for his new subjects and endear himself to them, styling himself as Lodewijk I, learning the Dutch language (during a speech he memorably called himself Konijn van 'Olland instead of Koning van Holland, i.e. the Rabbit of Holland), turning a blind eye to smugglers who traded with the English, and rebuffing his brother's demand to draft 30,000 men for his Grande Armée. Napoleon eventually became so fed up with him that he just annexed the Netherlands outright so he could rule it directly.
• Ely Parker, chief of the Haudenosaunee (or Iroquois), was an assimilated American Indian. He fought in the American Civil War and was with Grant at Appomattox.
• Lafcadio Hearn had a knack at this. Born in Greece to a local mother and an Irish father, he ended up traveling from Ireland to America, where he became a newspaper writer. After stirring up scandal by marrying a black woman, Hearn spent ten years in New Orleans, fell in love with its Creole culture, and through his writings basically created the distinct character of the city. In 1890 he wound up in Japan, and six years later had become a naturalized citizen under the name Koizumi Yakumo. He married into a samurai family and spent the last eight years of his life writing over a dozen books about the country, introducing Western audiences to Japan while documenting his new homeland's myths and legends at a time it was advancing into modernity. Though he's fairly obscure in the West, Hearn/Yakumo is still held in high regard in Japan. If you know him, it's likely because you read "The Boy Who Drew Cats" when you were a kid, or are a Touhou Project fan who got into the setting's supplementary material.

20-21th century

• Many immigrants or expats will find themselves doing as the locals do, taking up new languages, studying for citizenship tests, and adopting local customs as to fit in better at their new home.
  • A general rule of thumb in countries such as the US and Canada that have large immigrant populations is that the children born in their new home are, generally speaking, almost fully assimilated in the general culture, and their children certainly will be.
• Soldiers from any number of long-term occupying armies over the centuries have found themselves in settled lives, even marrying locals and having children, in the occupied countries.
• In the first and second World Wars, many African-American soldiers stationed in Europe elected to stay after the war was over due to Western Europe lacking the widespread racism of America, with France, Italy, and the UK being particularly popular due to interracial marriage not being as taboo as it was in the United States at the time.
• Helmuth von Pannwitz, a German general who was placed in command of the Cossacks who defected over to the Germans to fight the Soviet Union. Due to the respect and understanding he always showed for his troops and his tendency to attend Russian Orthodox services with them, Pannwitz was very popular among his Cossack volunteers. The Cossacks even voted him as their ataman, or supreme commander. When Pannwitz surrendered and his troops were turned over to the Soviets, he chose to go with them, even when told that as a German he was not subject to repatriation. He was convicted of war crimes and executed. The only thing preventing the whole thing from being a positive is the fact that the Cossack regiments under Pannwitz's command committed a number of atrocities against the civilian population, including several mass rapes, and routine summary executions. And, of course, continuing the Cossack tradition of Jewish pogroms.
• Henry "Papillon" Charriere reportedly spent some time with a native tribe in South America after one of his escapes from a French penal colony. He made friends with the chief, adopted a local lifestyle and subsistence, and married two women with whom he fathered children. However, there are doubts about how much of the story is true as Charriere is suspected of combining tales from other prisoners with his own and outright making some parts up for drama.
• US Special Forces are usually encouraged to assimilate into local cultures, adopt local customs and learn the language while on deployment. They also have a greatly relaxed uniform code which allows them to wear local dress and grow beards if necessary, and it is a common custom for them to wear the patches and emblems of any groups they are fighting alongside instead of the Stars and Stripes. This caused a minor incident when US commandos fighting ISIS were found to be wearing Kurdish flag and YPG patches, which Turkey, nominally a major US ally, consider terrorist symbols.
• Zigzagged by India’s MARCOS (Marine Commandos). They wear beards while on deployment to Kashmir and learn the local language to operate effectively as a counterinsurgency strike team. However, since Kashmir is technically part of India, it isn’t so much “going native” as it is just “going local”.
• In the 20th century in Washington, DC, it was dogma among conservatives that the State Department was a nest of liberals/communists. Every time a Republican president was elected, it was hoped that the new Secretary of State they appointed would set things straight down there. Much to their chagrin, however, it was invariably discovered that the new boss had instead taken on his subordinates' colors. He had Gone Native.
  • This is likely a problem of ideology not tracking reality. There was a feeling in Britain for much of the 20th century that the foreign office was cynical and conservative and similar disappointment when Labour foreign ministers were often seen to have 'gone native'. The truth is that most state department/foreign offices tend to be run along very pragmatic lines. If you are an ideologue/idealist of some sort—you think the state department should do more to dismantle and oppose communist regimes, or you think the foreign office should have a hand in ousting dictators regardless of whether we have 'friendly' relations with them—you're bound to be disappointed by a pragmatic approach and conclude foreign policy is being run by your ideological opponents.
• Arthur Andersen accountants sent to verify the accounts of Enron had their offices in Enron's building and were wholly integrated in the office life of Enron, participating to the evenings and the parties and acquiring their corporate values; this played an important role to explain why they didn't notice the books were cooked.
• There was a hilarious Transylvanian Internet meme in the form of a log that detailed a Hungarian politician becoming more Romanian with every entry, as indicated by his knowledge of the language improving, but his style becoming more raw and primitive. (As you might have guessed, the two groups don't much like each other.)
• Andre Cognat was a 23-year-old white Frenchman exploring South America when his canoe capsized in the Maroni River and some Wayana Indians rescued him. He decided to stay with the Wayana (who gave him the name Antecume), adopted their customs, and married a Wayana woman.

Inversions

There also exists inversions of this trope, where instead of someone assimilating into the local culture, the local culture assimilates into that someone: India being one such example with Turkic invaders.

• In Britain, the Anglo-Saxons ended up assimilating the native Britons to their language and culture, absorbing the native Celtic culture in most what is now England around the 6th and 7th centuries CE, and even that was not exclusive - Cumbric, a Celtic language closely related to Welsh survived until the 12th century and Cornish survived until the 17th century. Speaking of Celtic, it's a little-known fact that it was the dominant language group of continental Europe before the turn of the 1st millennium BCE; before Germanic and later Romance languages displaced them.
• Scythians/Sarmatians were the dominant culture of Central Asia and Eastern Europe before the 4th century CE, when East Slavic tribes conquered and assimilated them in Eastern Europe. They survived for a couple more centuries in Central Asia until the various Turkic and Persian kingdoms finally did them in.
• Most parts of the modern Arab world didn't speak Arabic until the Arab conquests and spread of Islam in the 7th century. The Iraqis and Levantines (Syrians, Lebanese, Jordanians, Palestinians) spoke Aramaic, the Yemenis spoke Old South Arabian, the Egyptians spoke... Egyptian (well, Coptic), the Sudanese spoke Nubian, and the Maghrebis (everyone west of Egypt) spoke Berber.
• What is now Turkey had underwent numerous changes to its main language. The population began to embrace Turkish in Eastern Anatolia after the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, when the Oghuz Turks defeated the Byzantines. It should be noted that Manzikert wasn't quite the critical battle later Byzantine historians, and others who followed their lead, saw it as when looking for the point when their decline began, despite the fact that the Emperor was captured ^note  After the traditional boot on neck pose, he was treated very politely, ransomed and released at the first opportunity. The main loss was the Emperor's valuable baggage train. From a military point it wasn't so much 'tipping point' as 'horrendously embarrassing'. However, it was around that point that Turkish started being spoken widely in Eastern Anatolia. Before that, it was Greek-speaking in the west and Armenian-speaking in the east. They themselves were originally replacements of the Ancient Anatolians, composed of numerous Indo-European tribes unrelated to either, as well as other Bronze Age cultures speaking language isolates (the Hurrians being a notable example). Some of them were even Celts, oddly enough.
• Something similar occurred in Pannonia; prior to the coming of the Magyars, the inhabitants there spoke various Latin and Slavic dialects. After the conquest, inhabitants of Pannonia started switching to speaking Hungarian/Magyar.
• When the Kievan Rus was conquered by the Mongols, the surviving Russian principalities became vassals of the "Tatar Yoke". Many of the autocratic and exploitative political systems of the Mongols were copied by the Russian princes. There is a lot of historical debate over the role of the Mongols in shaping Russia's authoritarian traditions.