There are two ways of looking at this question, depending on whether you're referring to internal or external interactions. Externally, different Native nations express a wide variety of interactions with one another, as you'd expect for must about any polity. There's trade, there's war. Alliances are made and broken. Enemies become allies. Allies become enemies. The full spectrum of human interactions on the national scale.

Internally, however, there are traditions that are more inline with what your friend said. Murder, theft, and the like still happen, as it does in all human societies. And some people do accumulate more material goods and wealth that others in some circumstances. But the goal of many societies in the Eastern Woodlands at least is to achieve a social harmony and balance within the community, which does involve ensuring that the basic requirements of those in need are met.

For example, in the early colonial period, Cherokee farmland was distributed by the clans to specific women. When it was time to plant, the entire community aided in each field, continuing until all the fields had been sown. Similarly at harvest, the community banded together to ensure the crops were collected in a timely and efficient manner. The women who owned and maintained the fields received the bulk of their produce, storing them in their family's own granary. A portion of everyone's harvest, however, went into a community granary from which those who had had poor harvests could supplement their reserves. Should the community granary run low, the women would organize what was effectively a charity dance, during which the community granary would be at least partially refilled by those in attendance. Unfortunately, these sorts of social safety nets became casualties of efforts to Westernize the economic systems.

See Theda Purdue's Cherokee Women for a more detailed account of the old economic system and the changes it underwent in the 18th and early 19th Centuries. Claudio Saunt's A New Order of Things, particularly the chapter entitled "The Hungry Years", also covers the social upheaval that accompanied the efforts to Westernize the Creek Confederacy and the resistance that rose up against the Creek elites who had begun to accumulate wealth rather than aid in distributing it the need in times of want as tradition dictated.

That is a common fallacy people believe in as well as that Native Americans lived in harmony with nature and did not disturb their ecosystem. The reality is that Native Americans fought frequently with each other and heavily modified their landscape.

Oh god no. While contemporary guide books to pioneers and folks trying to settle the American Frontier often were overly-zealous in their description of the "brute" and "savage" races of the native Americans, the reality was that just because they weren't xenophobic to the point of murdering everyone and anyone that wasn't their immediate tribe, they weren't the exact opposite.

First, probably the largest empires of their time- the Mayans, Aztecs, and Incans- were successful by basically having the largest clubs. The Aztecs were not unifiers- they brought many under their banner purely through the threat of force. The Incans did so with both peaceful assimilation, and pure simple conquest.

Further north the Apache, Sioux, Iroquois, and other native American groups (since Apache, Sioux and Iroquois are all broad terms denoting groups of tribes with some loose association) all demonstrated themselves to be quite capable of armed conflict, and caused a great deal of trouble, even for the US army when the US started trying to suppress the regions. Little Bighorn wasn't exactly an isolated affair, and the Native Americans didn't learn to fight because of European invasion.

We don't know what made the Anasazi leave their cliff dwellings, but we do know that the name's root meaning in Navajo isn't exactly a flattering term. It means "Ancient Enemy." Modern day Pueblo-Americans prefer you not use the term.

This image of a free, loving people is a myth. Native Americans experienced the full range of human events. The idea that they lived in harmony with nature is nonsense. We use satellite imagining to find ancient Mayan ruins for a reason.

I think this would be pretty easy to disprove through empirical evidence and logic. Native American tribes had differences and experienced conflict like all societies around the world, and the very presence of pre-Columbian weaponry demonstrates evidence of combat between cultures. It's not like they just picked up warfare when the Europeans arrived.

Even after Europeans arrived, the French intervened in the ongoing conflict between expansionist Iroquois tribes and the Algonquin and Huron natives that lived in the Lake Champlain area. The Iroquois were renowned conquerors who took advantage of being a larger, agriculture-based population, and had great success taking over Algonquin territory.

I was just at Angel Mounds last month. The Mississippian culture built the site as their northeasternmost outpost, and it was very heavily fortified against attack. As they were a pre-contact civilization (they collapsed 50 years before Columbus), all those fortifications were obviously to protect them from other Native Americans.

The fortifications would actually not have been out of place in Europe, which kind of blew my mind. (Reconstruction: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/Angel_palisade_wall_and_bastions_HRoe_2008.jpg)

They had a massively long two-story wall surrounding the entire city. It had bastions every so often, with platforms in the bastions to allow the defenders to sling stones at any attackers. Piles of sling stones were found at every bastion. The city wall was ringed with a second palisade, designed to slow down attackers. The City (which held 1000 people) was build alonside a river for easy supply, but with a thin long island fronting it for defense, as well as a reinforced slope. The other three sides of the city were protected by a moat, which was also a drainage system that the inhabitants kept deep and free flowing.

A general principle of fortifications is that you build them to suit your needs. This town was amazingly well protected. While we don't know much about their history, it's very clear they were very worried about attack.

Thank you everyone for your time comments. Very helpful. Much appreciated.