How many were murdered as a direct/indirect cause of the European colonists in North America? Also, did the slaughtering of the Indians get into full swing when there were still European settlers there or when (I don't really know how to put it into words) the people developed the American culture and accent etc. and they were seen as their own nation? (I don't mean in 1776, maybe before that).
Apparently there are very little "purebred" Indians alive today, that's why they are such a tight-knit community. So I want to know how many were murdered and if there were a lot of indigenous people before the colonists or were there little of them to begin with.
Hi there -- what you're asking gets to a large debate in Indigenous studies, which is to say that the "disease versus deaths due to intentional slaughter versus deaths due to slavery, etc." argument carries on. It is likely not knowable how to assign causality to native deaths, leaving aside the fact that how to assign causality such as "murdered" versus "died from disease" is rather problematic. We know for example that disease killed large numbers of native Americans, but recent scholarship has begun to suss out the links between disease leading to instability in native governments/polities, leaving people more open to outside disruption, slave raids, etc. It's not a neat line.
What is quite clear and indisputable is that there were deliberate genocides of Native groups carried out by colonial governments and the United States government, as well as individual state governments. We have a couple of posts on this topic, here and here, and r/IndianCountry has an extensive FAQ section on this. These are all relatively US-centric discussions of genocide, though mass enslavements and deaths indisputably also happened in Spanish and Portuguese America as well.
For more specific questions, you may want to start with this section of our FAQ and read downward.