What technologies did native Americans have better than westerners? What sciences did they have better?

Your question is fatally flawed (for reasons you didn’t intend with it), due to a few implicit assumptions it sets out, that make it impossible to answer. What follows has nothing against you are, your curiosity, or your interesting question. But i think we can view it as a teaching moment.

Firstly, this question accidentally reads as if native communities are not still thriving centres of creation and their own traditions, where they are making new forms of science and technology, often based in historical traditions, which I’ll get to in a moment. That’s because it’s been set in the past tense. Here is a recent journalist piece that touches on the issues of erasure even when non-native people have seemingly sympathetic motivations. Secondly, and this is the big faux pas that, again, you didn’t mean to suggest but it is imbedded in the question- these groups are and were vast, complex, and very different (as were ‘westerners’). So we’d want specific geographical anchor points. ‘What were the locally produced technologies of the Chumash?’ may not give you a comparable answer you seek, but it has a better chance to be answered, and then we could look at what technologies they kept after contact and colonisation, hinting at changes over time (which is our bread and butter as historians). Reframing the question thusly also allows a more pluralistic response as it leaves space for complexity—the technologies adopted by and then improved upon by certain groups, etc.- thus this is Indigenousising the question (for example, the use of the horse by Comanche peoples post the Colombian exchange, and even this example has historical disagreements: see here vs here.

You didn’t set a specific time period. If you asked this question about just Europe, you would have felt the need to add in some time marker so we know what century to investigate or what specific technology or science you were thinking about. It’s telling of the historical discipline (i’m equally guilty of doing this) that when we speak of Indigenous peoples in America we assume this to be around 1500-1900, but really we are thinking the mid-19th century, as that is the era that films and popular culture makes us think of when we picture these communities.

You’ve set it as a measuring stick comparison with terminology that would favour a western lens of development. It accidentally assumes that one form of technology or science would be deemed better than another without regard to hyper local contexts that give a range of answers. What do we mean by ‘technologies’? Were obsidian flaked arrowheads superior to iron or steel or broadheads? Well, by what measure? For hunting? For warfare? For first nations that had access to it, iron may have been better. For groups residing where obsidian deposits were and with traditions to make them, that would be the ‘better’ technology. I chose this particular example because it gets at an answer for you OP- which is that we now look back at more ‘primative’ technology with a reevaluating gaze- such as surgeons calling for obsidian scalpels as being better than steel ones . But if you lived in settlements and along trade networks, perhaps the better technologies were very local items you could sell to acquire all sorts of items you didn’t or couldn’t make yourself. Groups that could harness local plants for dyes not available to others had an economic advantage overlooked if we think of technology in terms of more generalised tools. Here the technology was the knowledge of nature.

The idea of Indigenous sciences being superior to western ones is being revisited quite a lot lately and with interesting points and it is here that your question should be approached. But once more we fall into value judgments. With the massive bush fires we just saw hit Australia, there is a return to examining the way aboriginal communities managed the landscape with an eye toward adopting these same philosophies and practices to prevent future megafires. Tied to this would be the decolonisation ethos in Australia of the aboriginal communities being the custodians of the land. In the US, this can be seen with seed collecting and efforts to return to native food practices in an era of climate change and fragility of monocrop industrial agriculture. The Cherokee nation recently placed their ancestral crop seed in the Norway doomsday vault. Sometimes sciences seen as superior don’t stand the long test of time. I’ll leave you with a single source that makes an excellent jumping off point to answer your question with the complexity it deserves, from an Indigenous perspective. Read Robin Wall Kimmerer’s excellent book, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Thanks for this question OP.

Edit- typos etc