go native

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go native (third-person singular simple present goes native, present participle going native, simple past went native, past participle gone native)

1. (idiomatic) To adopt the lifestyle or outlook of local inhabitants, especially when dwelling in a colonial region.
   • 1901, Rudyard Kipling, chapter 7, in Kim:

     St. Xavier's looks down on boys who ‘go native all-together.’ One must never forget that one is a Sahib, and that some day, when examinations are passed, one will command natives.

   • 1919, W. Somerset Maugham, chapter 53, in Moon and Sixpence:

     He was an extraordinary figure, with his red beard and matted hair, and his great hairy chest. His feet were horny and scarred, so that I knew he went always bare foot. He had gone native with a vengeance.

   • 2003, Alan Riding, "The Colors of Paradise As Imagined by Gauguin," New York Times, 14 Oct. (retrieved 27 Dec. 2008),

     Yet while Gauguin went native, taking teenage mistresses, wearing local costumes and building his own wooden hut, his ultimate purpose was to impress the art world back home.

2. (idiomatic) Of a contractor or consultant, to begin working directly as an employee for a company and cease to work through a contracting firm or agency.
   • 1989, Arthur Ernest Fitzgerald, The Pentagonists, page 204:

     […] we had to stop putting job-hunting colonels in charge of AFPRO detachments in the plants. It almost always happened that they went native and began to represent the contractor rather than the government.

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