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Clearly there were depredations on both sides. And the aboriginals fought among themselves before the Europeans ever arrived...For example the Sioux were originally woodland dwellers until conflict with the Chippewa forced them onto the Plains.

That said, if we consider American culture/civilization to be superior, then we should hold ourselves to a higher standard. The moral equivalency argument isn't one that I find compelling.

What happened in the Americas wasn't unique...invasion and conquest is a near-universal human theme, and the more technologically advanced culture ALWAYS supplanst the less advanced one. We could have handled the transition better and more ethically, but maybe that's expecting to much of 16th-19th Century humans (or maybe 21st Century humans for that matter).

We weren't the worst--I think it's indisputable that the Spaniards hold the dubious distinction, although the Russians in Alaska gave them a run for their money--but we weren't the best either.

The Indians probably fared somewhat better under British Colonial rule than in the American nation-state that supplanted it, and there was much less conflict in British Canada than on the American Frontier...so much so that it was possible to maintain order on the Canadian Frontier with a paramilitary police force (the North West Mounted Police, which later became the RCMP) rather than an army of conquest and occupation, as was necessary south of the border.

I would guess of all the colonial powers, the Indians probably fared best under the French, who were generally more interested in trade than in settlement.

Killings there were on both sides, yes, but depredations? Read this first hand account from Rachael Pratt, aged 15 when captured by the Comanches in Texas. She describes what happened to her new born baby. " He was about 6 weeks old, when I supposed they thought he was too much trouble, five or 6 sturdy Indian men came where I was suckling my infant; one of them caught it by the throat and choked it till it was black in the face and while doing so the rest of the men were holding me from trying to relieve my child. At length they pulled it from my arms by force, threw it up in the air and let it fall upon the frozen ground until life was, to all appearances, entirely gone.I tried to recover it, and as soon as they saw that it had recovered a little, they treated it as before several times, then they tied a thong around it's neck and threw it into the large hedges of prickly pears, which are 10 or 12 feet high, they would pull it down through the pears... several times , then they tied the end of the rope to their saddles, and would drag it round to me." This is not a rare account, there were others and worse from this book: Mary Donoho, first LAdy of the Santa Fe Trail. Check out the first hand accounts of the first Jesuits among the tribes of the NE ( A Few Acres of Snow is a book that describes some of these). They were tortured in the most terrible ways imaginable, by men, women and children. I guess one could make the arguement that the destruction of their cultures were equally henious, and perhaps they were, but in all my reading of American history, I have yet to read an account of pure torture, often done apparently for the pure enjoyment of it, done to Indians by whites.Killings, yes, torture, no. Yet unfortunate as it may be, there are lots of such accounts of such treatment to settlers by Indians. IMO, this was a clash of cultures between which there could be no reconciliation.

The Indians probably fared somewhat better under British Colonial rule than in the American nation-state that supplanted it,

Rummel, in Death by Government, puts the Indian death toll for the period from the Constitution to the end of the Indian wars at about 3000. I don't see any evidence to increase that number. That is less than 30 per year, not exactly evidence of genocide. Some of those deaths were on purely punative missions or in clearly defensive roles.

In the middle of this period the United States took a time out and killed 600,000 of our own. We had the capacity to obliterate any and all Indian tribes at any time we chose to do so. We did not. Read the Eastern newspapers of the time. The Indians had very powerful defenders and the sympathetic ear of the people.