Never discovered the wheel, never a written language other than basic pictograms, never progressed beyond a simple hunter-gatherer society, constantly warring with their neighbors for untold millennia.... I don't not want to knock Native Americans, but other than the communing-with-nature spirituality of it, I don't see much we can learn from them. To paraphrase someone else, show me the Tolstoy of the Apache. Or the Edison of the Comanche...
As Ive aged, Ive found my POV regarding Old Westerns change. The NA culture was so different, so alien to White largely European-descendat settlers, yes, they saw them as barbarians, and treated them as same.
The savagery of the natives was apparent to the first Europeans who met them; the French and English saw how they ate parts of vanquished foes, and tortured prisoners mercilessly. Spain saw even worse with the brutality of Aztecs, though they actually built cities.
I don’t knock them either; at one point Irish people lived in similar circumstances. No point in romanticizing it with fabrications...
There are no native Americans; their ancestors were merely the first migrants to the Americas.
The crops developed by AI's are primary food sources for the majority of the population today.
We can learn from Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce. Brilliant tactician and he gave some very stirring speeches. But I do agree, the modern age was invented largely by white men.
And there is vast evidence they did as they pleased making nature bend to them when they wanted. But that runs counter to the whole living-in-harmony narrative.