I’ve seen plenty of online debate on Native American reactions and tactics to European invasion, with both sides cherrypicking examples of “peaceful Natives” or “warlike savages”. This question is not asking about how Native American tribes acted; I understand there is are hundreds if not thousands of culturally diverse tribes and it’d be impossible to meaningfully group responses. Rather, are there patterns or “phases” of Native American tactics? From my broad and obviously thin understanding of history, it seems that initially tribes were a force to be reckoned with, from the Iroquois Confederacy to Tecumseh’s alliance being major opponents to the U.S. military, but eventually tribes started becoming more of a pushover for white settlers and soldiers, although conflicts became increasingly violent and on the white part genocidal. Was there an evolving understanding of the U.S. from tribal perspectives? Did survivors of Tecumseh’s alliance and the Trail of Tears warn of the futility of resisting the U.S. military, encouraging tribal leaders to more readily resort to diplomacy? Did survivors of Great Plains tribes warn of trusting U.S. treaties as anything more than shams, encouraging total war like with the Apaches? Or was the U.S. simply too large and diverse for information to reach tribes before American guns did?
I think this question assumes a homogeneity among native tribes. Often tribes were fighting amongst themselves. Europeans often played a role as another tribe to be reckoned with, either as an ally or as an enemy, as a trading partner and/or arms supplier. The long term narrative is of the constant invasion and rape of the tribes and land doesn’t accurately reflect the day-to-day interactions.
You only need to read about something like King Philip’s War and all its background and aftermath to see the complexity. Tribes would engage with and ally with settlers for their own advantage, and vice versa, trying to get a leg up on historical enemies.
The biggest advantage Europeans had was they had an endless supply of reinforcements. Sometimes the natives were horrified and upset by the extreme lengths the Europeans would go to, like completely destroying whole villages including non-belligerents, women, children, animals, crops, and houses would all be destroyed. But they often got terrible retribution for that, to the point of failure and near extinction of early colonies.
Europeans also had many technological advantages. They also brought a sense of superiority in the white race and inferiority of natives, and a mandate to convert and uplift the heathen. Don’t underestimate the power of even a misguided and erroneous philosophy in the hands of zealots.
Disease also played a role, especially smallpox. There are stories of intentional infection, but that doesn’t reflect the day to day reality. Europeans had centuries of innate immunity in their genetic code, and natives were never going to be able to obtain that. The losses and decimation were brutal in some cases.
All this took more than two centuries to happen, the image of a big war with massive migration that many people picture when viewing the whole of “New World” history just doesn’t apply. Remember, for decades, places like the middle of what is now the middle of Massachusetts was completely native territory which if any white person ventured would not live. It’s why banishment from a colony was such a huge deal as a punishment. It was basically a death sentence, either by exposure, dehydration, starvation, or disease. If you were lucky, you got a quick death at the hands of an animal or native tribe, though frequently people would be tortured to death or enslaved for entering native territory.
Caveat: I am not a professional historian, but this particular topic has always been of great interest to me (ie, How did what started out as a small group of people come to dominate an entire continent that was already occupied, sometimes by advanced peoples)