Part of it like… you know how normally tranquil animals can be scarily dangerous when they’re sick or threatened? For most of the contact period, indigenous American cultures were very sick and very threatened.

Like maybe 30 years ago Amerindian groups were still on about throwing off an old image of bloodthirsty savages taking scalps and all that. Like some band of postapocalyptic maniacs.

Postapocalyptic tales, of course, are largely a mechanism for retelling the “taming the wild frontier” narratives that were foundational to American culture.

Native Americans as frontline settlers encountered them and took as the essential nature of their race and civilizations what came through several simultaneous plagues that absolutely cratered population, followed by an alien invasion.

Those guys were living in a postapocalypse.