Neither of those are really true. What actually happened was far less romantic. We walked into basically an empty land because the natives genocided them selves into nothingness by the time that we arrived. We expanded and as we expanded the natives used us as proxy shields for their internal wars and we ended up stopping all the killing murdering, scalping and raping that they were doing to each other. There were a few massacres and some conquest, but mostly it was just moving into unoccupied land and stopping the natives from acting like fucking savages that they are and we played politics to help one indian tribe win against another. The same happened in the rest of america with the exception of the Aztecs that thought white people were gods and just gave them selves up. But, once again, whites taking over mexico was actually what stopped those fucking people from their slaughter of millions of innocents just for shits and giggles. People act like natives are some kind of noble people. They are murderous rapists, all of them. Want to know what really goeson in native communities regardless if they are on a reserve or not? Ask any white nurse that has had the misfortune of working in those communities. Basically its all rape all the time. There are no native young women that are not raped by adulthood. Maybe @LakotaPride wants to step in and provide counter narrative.