alt Hacker News> most of the big wars against the Native Americans
As I learned it, most of the conflicts were between not against. Native Americans, became a term as a general catch all but those peoples saw themselves as quite diverse, and as such is something of a misnomer.
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Look up the american bison. The US government's official policy was to eliminate bison to eliminate Indians/First Peoples. Mountains of skulls. In under a decade, the bison population was pushed down from 30-60M to approximately 500 individuals.
Did tribes fight and war and capture slaves? Yes. They did that for forever. Then colonization and disease and westward expansion. Look up the Trail of Tears, the genocide and/or ethnic cleansing.
Your education may align with propaganda. Even today, first people nations are actively having their history taken. Pete Hegseth, sec of def/war, has pushed to close the door on the massacre of wounded knee, enshrining the medals earned for slaughtering woman and children. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/27/us/hegseth-wounded-knee.h....
Look up how the US government stole native kids and sent them catholic schools to have the Indian taught out of them. A system that was purpose built to stop their way of life. Or forced, non-consented sterilization of native woman that was happening in the 60s and 70s.
If you somehow didn't know the US government's history of conflict and abuse of Native Americans, you should question your formal education. And you should do some light research.
Prior to western colonization of course the native people had conflicts, just not at the scale the colonizers could achieve. During the genocide of the natives some tribes used it as an excuse to kill their enemies, sometimes to curry favor with a technologically superior force, and sometimes just to kill their enemies. Some fought back against the invaders, with varying degrees of success. Most people just died.
None of that makes it less of a war against the native americans.
It's really hard to read this comment as anything other than "don't worry about the genocidal policy of the US with regards to the natives, for they were a violent people."
Indeed, it's actually an example of problem I lamented: the disinterest in covering Native American history post-founding of the US. The last of major conflicts between different Native American tribes took place around the 1850s, the lingering effects of the Lakota being pushed onto the Plains [1]. From that point on, all of the main conflicts are between the US and the various Native American tribes for a variety of reasons, although mainly "the US wants your land and isn't going to take 'no' for an answer."
[1] If you want to analyze the broader historical context, you of course have to ask "why did the Lakota move onto the Plains?" and following that thread of logic leads you to the first cause being "the English settled on the eastern coast."