They, like most other people in the world, had slavery, genocide, theft, the death penalty, and all sorts of other bad things. None of this excuses colonialism, at all. But to pretend that native peoples were some kind of wonderful noble savages is very very racist in and of itself. Even this comment is fairly racist because I just implied some kind of homogenous culture in North American indigenous peoples, which was obviously not the case.

Criminality as we understand it is a European concept. Native Americans had relatively advanced societies before the colonial settlers came through and genocided hundreds of tribes. Their politics were pretty complex, but they didn't have criminals the way we understand the term.

Who exactly are you talking about when you say "they"? Indigenous peoples weren't all the same culture and didn't have all the same cultural practices.

You seem like an expert on the topic, do you know if they had chattel slavery?

WTF

I was all set to type up a little semi agreeing comment about how it was a continent-spanning complex mixture of very different tribes with different cultures and practices, only some of whom practice slavery

But I don't really know what I'm talking about so I read a little and I got distracted by this

Several tribes held captives as hostages for payment.[2][3] Various tribes also practiced debt slavery or imposed slavery on tribal members who had committed crimes; full tribal status would be restored as the enslaved worked off their obligations to the tribal society.[2][3]

Slaves would sometimes be killed in potlatches, to signify the owners' contempt for property.[citation needed]

And this

Captive-taking was most often used to replace a dead loved one within the family with a new person. The captive would then take on this deceased person’s sexual or labour-related capacities.

What the fuck was going on with the Native Americans