Hard times make for hard people.
The Indians were living in hard times.
What galls me is the papering-over of their history and the swipe at Americans of European Descent for being too “hard” on the Indians.
Every society and civilization on earth lived through "hard times." The difference is that some civilizations did something about it by applying human ingenuity and industriousness. That's a weak excuse for 10,000 years of nothing.