[poster123]

White Americans progressively pushed the American Indians off of their land, and in reaction, there were many cases where the American Indians responded by slaughtering the families of white American settlers -- not just the men but non-combatant women and children. So one can see why many white Americans did regard the American Indians as "merciless savages", and also what caused the American Indians to behave as they did.

[tomohawk]

That's an incredibly simplified view of what actually happened, and therefore a false narrative - about what you'd expect from watching a Hollywood movie. In many cases, American Indian tribes had been fighting each other for millenia, and thought they could use the newcomers to their advantage against enemy tribes. The Sioux, for example, were newcomers to the plains, having recently driven out / exterminated other tribes that had been there for quite some time.

If you're interested in this sort of history, there are many good books. Here's one:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17571536-the-heart-of-ev...

[teilo]

Thank you for this. Balance it hard to find. The fact is that we are speaking not of a monolithic nation, but of individual tribes with unique histories. Lumping Native Americans into a single bucket, while politically useful, is ahistorical. Nations war over access to land and resources. This is just at true of the first nations as it is of the new worlders.

The atrocities committed by the US government against the first nations should not be whitewashed. Neither should the atrocities committed by one tribe against another. But few would contest the obvious truth that the former greatly exceeded the latter in terms of scope and effectiveness, particularly due to the imbalance of power.

[poster123]

The atrocities of the first nations against white settlers should also not be whitewashed.

[teilo]

I don't. But I also don't stigmatize it. They treated the white settlers just like they treated rival tribes - as competitors for land and resources. As in nearly all of human history, these conflicts are settled by war and bloodshed.