I believe that graphic of a shaman is from a prehistoric European cave painting.
this article is a hit piece indeed. Unnamed sources and unattributed quotes, which means the writer made it all up.
People in general know very little about the way of life of native americans before the arrival of Europeans and it was in general quite rigorous and also violent.
It was an extremely hard life. Starvation was always at one’s elbow. torture and slaughter of enemy women and children were the norm. Some children were taken captive after their parents were killed. Look up Crow Creek Massacre on Wikipedia. This along with lice, fleas, skin infections, etc.
The romantic view of native people is untenable. there were many wonderful things about the various cultures but a clash between Europeans and the native people was inevitable. A tragedy. but liberals are incapable of nuanced thought.
It was inevitable that the "native people" here would lose their dominance, no matter who had traversed the oceans, in any number, with intent to stay. The harsh reality was that various tribal groupings, based on neolithic hunter gatherer frameworks had neither sufficient manpower, nor technology to defend what they were holding from any outside group who possessed superior technology, and the concomitant increased manpower accompanying said technology.
Had the Black Death truly "depopulated" Europe, making it a veritable ghost continent, the colonizers of North America could have been Islamics, where the native people would have been faced with the stark choice, as stated earlier in the thread, of submit to Islam, and being Arabicized, or be exterminated. If it had come from the west, from China, well, the more recent model of Tibet gives us the inevitable outcome. In short, it did not matter who it was that 'discovered' them, the outcome would not have been any other than their displacement as the dominant culture.
The fact that it was a culture where Christian principles held some sway, even if only partially, allowed some remnants of the native cultures to survive...
the infowarrior