It's not that simple, really. And I don't think it's the same, though I don't want to trivialize it.

I was writing a big huge thing about the different histories of how land changed hands in different parts of the country - forcible removal, versus fair purchases, versus unfair purchases - and even fair purchases followed by political struggles, dynastic struggles, and attacks - wars of extermination, wars with inconclusive endings. But honestly there's just too much to just post about. I think we look at the United States now and think of it as obviously huge and powerful and able to tell anybody to move or die, but that wasn't the reality for a lot of the history, especially in early colonial times. We're talking about a whole continent with a dozen or two dozen different nations on it involved in a whole complex series of inter-related conflicts, agreements and wars.

One of the biggest problems with the whole cultural genocide aspect is that we've lost so much of the history of what happened, all the peoples, all the lessons of the time. Although there is some hope that this knowledge not being known to people is more a product of Eurocentric education than of the knowledge actually being permanently lost.

The various native peoples were not one big "they," and they were not dupes or stupid. I think it's pretty much impossible to overemphasize the importance of the smallpox epidemics in how it all went down - in particular, the huge amounts of vacant land that made the practice of purchasing land and asking for or forcing people to move in exchange seem like a reasonable idea at first for everybody involved, and then how over time it went bad in a whole bunch of different ways, not the least of which being misunderstandings of what purchasing land rights meant - and the subsequent wars that caused.

Even just the Black Hawk War you've mentioned, the legal and economic background behind it is very complex - the land purchases, the factions within the Black Hawks, the other wars the Black Hawks had been involved in, their other war with the Mormons, how it all relates to Andrew Jackson.

And even then the actual war only involved about a thousand natives, combatant and noncombatant, because, we can surmise, the ancestors of the Black Hawks lost a huge share of their population to smallpox.