ABSTRACT
As one examines continuities and discontinuities between societies of origin and societies of contemporary minority status, and the consequences for cognitive functioning and socialization, a consideration of Native-American Hawaiians and Native-American Navajos offers a comparison of some interest. Both groups have been incorporated into the United States by conquest, and they are highly similar in a socialization for survival typical of traditional peoples. However, they are sharply different in the dimension of socialization for individualism versus collectivism. For Hawaiians, the island ecological system produced a collective productive economy, and a socialization system that produced cognitive operations of a collective style. The nomadic, and later pastoral, eco-productive system of the Athabascan peoples (of which the Navajo are the currently most salient group) produced a much more individualistic orientation, both in production and cognition. Although the patterns of individualism are still collectivistic in comparison with Euro-American tradition, Navajo child cognition contrasts clearly in important dimensions in Hawaiian child thinking—in ways that correspond to surviving socialization practices in the two cultures.
