Amazing isn't it? After 400 years of contact with European civilization, that Indians in my grandmother's day were still living a stone age existence. My grandmother was born in 1894.
If a people can not defend their borders they will lose their land. It was inevitable. Given their culture they doomed themselves.
Native Americans did not possess the numerical advantage necessary to withstand encroachment of whites on this continent.
Add to that, the limitations they had in technology, inability to resist disease, lack of cohesion as a population, etc. … and the history practically writes itself.
Actually, Native Americans underwent what other ancient and vulnerable groups had long since experienced at EACH OTHERS’ hands. The strong overcame the weak for millennia before Europe took on the national boundaries and cultural expression we recognize today.
Native Americans experienced this so recently in human history simply because Europeans took so long arriving in North America, in any kind of numbers.
And some tribes were worse off than others. Some were pretty organized. Others were bark-eating beggars. Just as it is racist and simplistic to view the Europeans as monolithic, the same goes for the Indian tribes. The Flatheads were a lot different than the Cherokee, who were different than the Apache, who were different than the Cheyenne, etc.