3rd Equality Journal/Native American Journal

I have always been extremely interested in Native Americans and the history that exists between the colonization of America and Native Americans. I researched specifically the Battle at Wounded Knee and talked about that. After I read and learned more about the story, I watched the movie Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, which was also extremely moving.
It's hard to understand how the immigrants coming to America at the time of colonization thought that they had rights to the land, when it wasn't there's! They just immediately assumed that they were more powerful than the Indians, and could push them around right off of their land!
I'm not naive enough to believe that the indians just rolled over and allowed the colonists to take their land, but they were the underdogs. The indians had no guns to defend themselves with. Arrows are a formiddable weapon, but they don't compare to the power that a gun can contain.
The particular thing that I studied, the Battle at Wounded Knee, all took place because of a cultural difference. The indians were participating in a "ghost dance", and this made the army surrounding the indians nervous. This kind of makes me think that maybe most of the racial inequalities are based on cultural differences.
The indians made us nervous because they had different methods of survival and a completely different culture. If we had been accepting of them from the beginning, and learned to appreciate and respect their way of life, would we have the problems that we had with them? Or would we have assimilated rather than practically exterminate the indians?
None of these questions can be answered exactly, but it does make you think about the current times and what we can be doing now to prevent something like this from happening again.