One of the earlier historians wrote that trade for iron conquered the Indian. Better arrow and spear heads, better knives, and something I hadn't considered - iron pots. The squaws no longer had to heat stones and drop them into a gourd full of water. (I can just see some hapless brave coming home and facing "Running Deer, how come I have to put up with heating rocks while all the others have iron pots. Until you get me one, I have a headache.")
For all those claiming victimhood, look at how your brethren are still treated even today in South and Central America. Especially, ask the folks in the Mexican state of Chiapas.
*PBS has a short series called "Frontier House". One episode had the white guys eating venison shot by the Indians, who could hunt out of season. One of the Indians was a prof at a local college and was an expert on applying guilt trips. He said something like, "I find it ironic that we hunt on land that is no longer ours while you can settle on it." I would have asked him how many Indian tribes would still let their enemies hunt on land that they stole from them? What I found ironic was that the white man, who won, couldn't hunt on that same land but the Indians, who lost, could.
There's a neat movie clip on YouTube where General Miles speaks my thoughts.
Most of the Indian tribes had pottery. They didn’t need to use gourds or leather bags to cook.
The big advantage of metal pots is they are really hard to break as compared to pottery. Especially if you’re nomadic.
BTW, many of the Indian peoples, especially in Central and South America, were well past Stone Age and were civilized by any reasonable standard.
Jared Diamond is a famous author in this area. He discusses the results in several areas around the world where more advanced agricultural peoples move into areas previously inhabited only by hunter-gatherers.
The result is invariably that the HGs lose, not surprisingly when the farmers have a population density perhaps thousands of times greater.
When JD discusses the Bantu displacement of the San or pygmies, or of early hunter-gatherers in Indonesia or Caribbean, he uses neutral verbs like "settle" or "displace."
When we get to more modern times and he discusses European movement into America or Australia, the verbs change to judgmental ones: conquer, invade, even genocide.
Was there any real difference for the people in the losing cultures? Probably not.