[dextorious]

> America wasn't founded in order to take anything from Natives; this was a very unfortunate side affect.

I'm not sure. The whole point of the conquest of the Americas was pillaging and exploiting the new continent by and for the European nations. Even the words "conquest, conquistador" etc speak volumes.

America (as in "the US") itself, was just some of those people descendants that declared themselves a new sovereign nation. But they too had to take the land from its previous inhabitants, an operation that started before the US established and declared independence, and continued even after that.

[Symmetry]

"Conquest" wasn't ever a word commonly used by those particular Europeans that ended up later forming the USA, though. That was how the Spanish talked about what they were doing. The English ideology was all about "settling" or "colonizing". The English didn't see the natives as a resource to be exploited by an obstacle to be either ignored to negotiated with. This later caused many problems due to the English and Native Americans having very different notions of property and what buying land meant.

[dextorious]

"""This later caused many problems due to the English and Native Americans having very different notions of property and what buying land meant."""

Yeah, especially as for the English it meant "taking your land for peanuts".