This is what I find so objectionable about these kinds of discussions, and just supports my long held opinion that it is almost impossible to have rational discussions about certain issues.
To refuse to become an iconoclast destroying the symbols of the past, or a revisionist re-writing it, or to engage in endless self-flagellation for the sins of white people/Europeans etc., means you're going to wind up being accused of supporting what happened to the native peoples of the Americas.
It's both illogical and unfair.
I would hope it's clear from my years posting here that I think what happened to indigenous peoples all over the world, not just in the Americas, but in Greenland, and Russia, and southeast Asia, and Africa, and on and on is horrible and inexcusable. I just think it needs to be seen in all its complexity, and in its universality, as has been said.
Even removing any intent to actually conquer them, what happened to the indigenous peoples of the Americas was in some ways inevitable. The first English colonists in Virginia and Massachusetts had no initial intent to "conquer" the Indians, or even worse, exterminate the Indians and annex all their lands. They had no vision of the hundreds of thousands of colonists who would soon start flooding the "New World". They perhaps naively hoped to find some sort of way of living with the natives. That didn't stop the natives from dropping like flies of all the illnesses to which Europeans had become immune. Nor did it change human nature; landless people from Europe saw what was to them unused, valuable farmland, and moved on to it, and Indians saw their hunting lands disappearing. Conflict was inevitable. Things were different in "Latin America", because the Indian societies were more advanced, and far richer.
I don't see how this wasn't, in some ways, just like what happened to the Middle Neolithic people of Europe when contact first occurred with the people from the steppe. Even if the goal wasn't conquest, disease would have done the job, and the fact that the climate had changed and their "agricultural package" was no longer viable. It's the history of the world terrible as it is.
At any rate, as I said, by no means do I condone what was happened to them; in fact, it breaks my heart. There are few films more profoundly moving than "Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee", or "The Mission". Yet, "Black Robe" is the reality of Amerindian societies at the time of contact. Some films are actually well researched and accurate, though certainly not all.
I also honestly don't see how indigenous societies can continue to exist once they come into contact with people from modern cultures. Look at the San, or the people in the islands of south and southeastern Asia, or the Indians of the Amazon. Trading with them is impossible; we will infect them. The only way to save the Indians of the Amazon is to make whole areas of it in effect reservations. First and foremost it's to protect them, to keep them from becoming infected. It's also to protect their lands from the land hungry poor of Brazil and surrounding countries who want to feed their children, whether by subsistence farming or working for logging companies etc. Those are the people who are not "seen" in these discussions about how corporations create all the evil in the world.
If someone were to ask me if I see a solution for all of this, the answer would be no; it's tragic and depressing, but there it is.
As for this growing division in the U.S. I would say this: I'm a liberal too, in the sense that I'm a classical liberal; I'm a firm believer in the republican form of democracy which is the bedrock of this country. I am for equal rights before the law for all people, regardless of religion, or race, or ethnicity. What I am not for is a guarantee of equal outcomes. What I am also not for is the Maoist inspired, profoundly anti-Democratic, anti-due process, violence based, "woke", "successor" revolutionary ethos which started sweeping college campuses years ago and has now burst out, as I always predicted it would if funding for universities which tolerated it wasn't pulled and if private donors didn't close their wallets.
For Americans who think they can co-exist with it, I think they're being incredibly naive. Eventually they'll have to be re-educated too. I recommend they all pick up a good history of the Chinese Cultural Revolution or the Leninist period in Russia and the show trials of the 30s which followed it. History has a nasty habit of repeating itself.
Why am I so sure it's coming? I was watching Anderson Cooper the other night. I have always thought he's a well meaning, reasonably balanced newscaster. He was interviewing a black activist of the disband the police type when, to me, an extraordinary thing happened. He asked her whether instead of disbanding the police, policing the police, more prosecutions of bad behavior wouldn't suffice. Without batting an eye she said that see, there's a problem because the police have all these due process rights! He said not a word in response. Apparently, investigations of the accused, trials, due process rights for defendants, things for which the left has vociferously fought for decades, are now to be tossed out, and mob rule and vigilante justice is to be instituted. When that can be said, unchallenged, on an American news program, it's time to prepare for the worst.