I am from India.
I claim that I have no understanding of the Native American traditions which got lost or which were forced into oblivion. However, I certainly do have a perception from everyday experience how greedy as a human race we have become. There is little or no respect for the dignity and basic humanity of people who stand outside our defined boundaries of culture, race. Our values have increasingly and detrimentally shrunken.
Its not just the American Natives or Australian Aboriginies who suffered slaughter in the past, almost every other country outside europe did. We may claim that it was the anscestors who caused that but we do it even today. With consumerism and things we consider as civilised and sociable, we are forcing poor countries to adopt measures which absolutely don't have any intrinsic value in their context and are crippling them. We are forcing them out of their indigenous methods of art, culture, methods of daily life including farming and making them supply houses for the greedy corporations/consumeristic driven people who consider rest of the world as their play ground.
Its the lack of foresightedness of the part of people at the helm of affairs, who put profit over service as a driving factor and parameter of progress, growth, prosperity which is to blame for this.
Its hard in modern time for an individual to have a free thinking mind, who can learn from nature and its magnificience without having to worry for the daily job and study engineering, journalism to earn his living. Thanks to the classic education programs which we came up and gave to the rest of the world, because we were the first one's to come up with a lighting bulb or a railway engine.