There can be no doubt that continental America is an Empire in which the conquered peoples have been marginalized and–to a lesser extent–assimilated. The population density of the Indians even prior to the plagues that beset them–and which have every appearance of being simply epidemic reactions to diseases to which they had no antigens, and nowhere the result of official policy, despite much propaganda to the contrary–were nothing remotely like Europe.
We conquered them. We marched them into camps. Many died. The remainder were left to live, more or less in peace.
One thing we never did is enslave them. This fact became clear to me in listening to a history of the Vikings. It was not known to me–and likely not well known generally–that the wealth upon which the kingdoms of Denmark, Norway and Sweden eventually came to be founded was in large measure the product of slaving. Throughout Viking history, human captives taken in raids were one of their primary commodities. They took many Irish, who were often–like West Africans–only too eager to capture and hand their rivals over.
They took so many Slavs that that is where we get the name “slave” from. They would come into a village, kill anyone who resisted, and take everyone–men, women, and children, provided they were healthy–and sell them to merchants who would trade them on down-river, usually to the Islamic world.
And when one studies world history, it is a litany of atrocities. It is no exaggeration to say that Britain and the United States, as Christian nations, are the first ones to develop a principled basis by means of which to object to what had been going on for all of human history. The Chinese kept slaves. The Greeks kept slaves. The slavery of the Jews in Egypt is part of their foundational narrative, that they remember ritually every year. The Romans kept slaves. And to the point here, the American Indians also kept slaves. The pattern was the same: you raid a neighboring village, and carry off the women you want, and the children to be raised in your way, and to do your work.
When looking at history, there is little use hand-wringing, and judging people by our own standards. What we need to track is the genesis and evolution of ideals, and then figure out how we can best improve upon and better implement those ideals in the modern world. Flogging yourself does no good for anyone but you: the benefit to you is you free yourself thereby from the responsibility of living in the present, and making adult decisions in what will always be a fluid and ambiguous world.