[rayiner]

Native Americans were here for tens of thousands of years. If it was so easy to use Indians’ resources to build a civilization, why didn’t the Indians do it?

Your attitude is illogical cope. How could “WASPs” have gotten rich from stealing from a group of people they vastly outnumbered and who were primitive in comparison?

[amanaplanacanal]

They did build a civilization. Which was then ravaged by diseases brought from Europe by the early explorers. By the time Europeans started settling what became the United States the native population was living in what was essentially a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

[rimbo789]

Given all the raping, enslaving, pillaging, and general genociding europeans did upon arrival to North America I don’t think we can say it was the First Nations that were “primitive”

[mc32]

The local tribes were mostly one of two types, the nomadic (ex. Comanche) and the agricultural (Apache). The former would often raid the latter, killing many of the men and taking the women and children --often, but not always, they'd end up being their slaves. So the behavior of the Europeans you describe of the time was not out of the ordinary for the locals.

[pdonis]

If you think those things didn't happen before the Europeans arrived, you need to think again.

[watwut]

They had own civilization. They lost war and were genocided out. And for the record, they had wars against themselves too, just like Europeans had wars against other Europeans.

Both slavery and territorial expansion by force were wealth builders. Both took quite a lot of time too. Both were quite barbaric from our point of view, but cruelty and violence can be wealth builder. After all, Putin is super wealthy too. Stalin ended up wealthy too. Hitler same deal. There is not much difference in there.

[rayiner]

> Both slavery and territorial expansion by force were wealth builders.

It’s mathematically impossible for American settlers as a group to have become wealthy by expropriating wealth from Indians. Individual Indians had almost nothing—they were hunter gatherers with a small number of subsistence farmers. Nor did they have much wealth in the aggregate—their population was quite small even pre-contact. The America population in the first census was almost 4 million, which is higher than most estimates of even the pre-contact north america population. A more populous society can’t become rich by expropriating wealth from a poor, less populous society. That’s just math.

What actually happened is that the American settlers built a civilization that utilized the resources of the continent vastly more productively than the Indians had. That’s entirely different.

[alex1138]

However, I think the Spanish can certainly be blamed

Some incredibly harrowing stories in Wade Davis's One River

There is also a chance some of the disease giving unto the native americans was by accident, not intentional