We like happy endings. From Disney to romcoms, there’s just something about a story that goes well, even if happy endings may be more elusive in real life. In this case though, I’m not sure “happy endings” is a fitting viewpoint for what happened and is still happening and being done to various indigenous populations around the globe.

So, to turn this question (and peoples' expectations I guess) around: I can’t provide any feelgood examples but can talk about why that is. In short, the examples you mention all go back to colonial situations tied to exploitation of people, land and/or resources. This systemic imbalance and inherent discrimination is hard to just put aside to focus on some things that didn’t go “as wrong” for a moment. Edit: My main focus is on the Americas which (esp. Spanish America) I'm more familiar with.

What do I mean with colonial situations? I’m following Jürgen Osterhammel’s definition here of a “colony”:

A colony is a newly formed political construct, created through invasion (conquest and/or settler colonisation) and building on pre-colonial conditions. Its foreign dignitaries are in continuous dependancy relations to a far away "motherland" or imperial centres, which raises exclusive claims of ownership to the colony. [my transl]

This is clearly a relation of ownership and dependency. From there Osterhammel distinguishes different categories: Dominions, Foothold colonies and Settler colonies (which I discuss some more over here ). While there are major differences between how these modern colonial empires worked, they did have the dependency of the colony to the metropolis in common.

Note that some of your examples fall within the settler colony type – incl. the New English colonies, Canada (fr./br.), and Australia. These were (following Osterhammel) formed as a result of colonial processes aided by the military. They were supposed to lead the use of cheap lands and cheap (foreign) labout; and make possible the socio-cultural practices of minorieties that were questioned and/or persecuted in the motherland. Colonial presence was primarily through permanent settlers and farmers. Early on this would include the beginnings of self-governance of "white" colonists while violating the rights and interest of the indigenous populations. Displacement and partial destruction of the native populace were the rule.

In many ways then, these forms of modern colonialism go hand in hand with European expansion, and usually facilitated it. This could mean the extraction of resources through forced native labor; the displacement of native people for their lands; or both. There was of course also non-European colonialism: you mention Japan, but also Russia. It could be argued that both were emulating European imperial examples though.

In addition, often arguments are made about certain powers’ colonisation being more “benign” or “less violent “ than others’. Examples could include French colonies in North America focusing more on trade with native people than on displacing them; or the Dutch in Asia again with a strong focus on trade. While these are outside my expertise I would add that we can’t describe one colonial power as somehow more benign. French colonialism in Algeria with major wars was very different from Quebec, and the Dutch certainly committed massacres in their colonies. So it’s more helpful here to focus on regions and forms of colonialism, rather than overall on specific European powers. And again, all these examples were based on hierarchical relations.

For most of your examples I would also like to stress the major demographic catastrophes following colonisation. The Americas saw the largest demographic decline in modern times from the combined effects of diseases (against which there existed no prior immunity), warfare, forced labor and displacement. While epidemic had the largest toll, the combination of the other factors also meant larger vulnerability for further diseases in Spanish America. Patricia Seed has summed up the effects in her very good “American Pentimento”:

Although Europeans took over Africa and Asia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by force of arms, they did not also exterminate the inhabitants of those continents with microbes.16 In the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand, native populations were decimated (reduced by 90 percent) during the first hundred years.17 A few native communities, such as those led by the sixteenth-century Tupac Amaru, were able to conceal themselves in remote mountain hideaways, but no large group could keep out of sight effectively for long. And those who reemerged, along with the 10 percent who had survived the ravages of disease, were not always those most familiar with their groups’ cultural traditions or most able to reconstitute their networks.

The decimated remnants of once-thriving native communities had to reinvent themselves and their societies within sight and sound of numerous armed and healthy invaders, their weapons, and their demands for wealth. Overwhelming military force combined with the loss of 90 percent of the entire native population to ensure that European economic demands played a fundamental role in restructuring native communities to serve European dreams of gain.

This does not mean that the many and very different native people in those regions did not resist and did not carry forward their traditions – far from it. These are very much ongoing struggles, with esp. groups in the Anglosphere fighting for the recognition of land rights, and groups in Latin America fighting for recognition of human rights. These differences also connect to the disparate English and Spanish approaches to colonisation. Still, the major impact of these demographic catastrophes in those regions – I find – dwarves any smaller stories of individual kindness that surely existed.

I’ll leave such stories to others, and tried to show in a short reminder why it’s difficult nowadays to think the fate of indigenous groups in terms of happy endings – when far too many are still suffering under the effects of colonial exploitation, and trying to better that situation.

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NB: "native" people in a very general sense can mean any population native to a certain place in the world. For obvious reasons I can not speak to all those places, with colonisation having wildly different effects and outcomes in different parts of the world. My focus here was mainly on OPs examples, and esp. on indigenous people of the Americas. There, as I mention, colonial contact had specific effects including the esp. strong demographic catastrophe.

Could the rebuilding of Japan after WWII be considered a partial colonization by the United States?