The "whites" didn't treat the Indians any worse or differently than they had treated each other for as long as recorded history. History tells a story of brutal competition between rival factions. It was a world of conquer or be conquered. The Indians were not even in the game. They were incapable of governing themselves, and thus incapable of handling their contact with the European powers. It was their destiny to be conquered.
This brutal competition between European powers didn't do us any favors either. One of the reasons our quaint, limited government was transformed into the centralized monster we see today is because the leaders of the Union had to worry about Europe. They had to have a government capable of standing up to that sort of competition. Were it not for that fact, we might still be a small confederacy of states.
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.
I would hardly call the indians “bystanders”. They were right there in the thick of it shifting alliances right along with the Europeans. Each individual tribe or group of indians went with who ever offered the best deal at the moment.
One of the pivotal events that led to the revolution in my book was the British decree that there would be no expansion west beyond the appalachians. The brits didn’t do it out of love for the indians, they did it as a means of gaining indian support and as a means of keeping the colonies. After the revolution, all best we off and several different factions fell into decades of fighting. The fighting in the midwest was especially brutal due to the strategic importance of the midwest.
That's not entirely true. The Iroquois were very well organized with a functioning government. The "Iroquois Influence Thesis" has been pretty well dismissed as an influence on our Founding Fathers but the fact that such a thesis could even be considered shows that there were common elements in both models of governance.
That's not to say they weren't brutal; "killed by Indians" is too common a cause of death in my family tree. Some tribes were organized and quite efficient at warfare. Disease, poor alliance choices, and military technology were greater contributors to their downfall.