Oh John. I don't want to argue, but I've heard and read all of this. There are plenty of records and information provided by First Nations. Remember, the government wanted to expand west and white settlers wanted land. A lot of the stuff we learned was propaganda, and using this kind of information to make a rebuttal to the writer's essay isn't an argument.

It's frustrating people willingly accept information without questioning it and then state, "it's the only information available, so it must be true". Dude, come on. You're better than that.

The story about the Hopi is true and there's a few books about it. The first story was published a few years after the event occured and the intention was to paint Native Americans as savages, but when women anthropologists collected information from the Mojave and Navajo in Arizona, the story matched the cultural details of the Hopi. Can we ever know the exact truth? No, probably not, but evidence provides some direction.

And here's an essay about Europeans discovering democracy: https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/democracy/hiding-plain-sight