What happened to the native american population?

Through a variety of methods, they were killed or driven out of their lands by various nations and peoples. This is only a brief overview of what happened to them, and only applies to North America and what is now the continental US.

In what is now the United States, the near total destruction of the Natives and their cultures began subtly and, quite frankly, accidentally. Before European discovery of the “New World,” Native Americans in the eastern part of N. America actually had established farming communities and so on, with quite sophisticated societies, farming technologies, and so on. But once European settlers came to the continent, various diseases that the Natives weren’t immune to swept through their communities, and this happened through the Native trade routes - indeed, most of those who died from these plagues had not only never seen a white person, they’d never even HEARD of white people!

In many cases, the survivors left their villages and joined those Natives that were more of what we think of as Natives in N. America, I.e. bands of people who migrated with animal herds and so on. These tribes were not as effected by the plagues as those in farming communities - because they moved around, the diseases didn’t have the breeding grounds that villages offered (like garbage pits or rodents).

Fast forward to Colonial times. By the time of the US Revolution, most tribes in the far east had been pushed back to at least the Smokey Mountains, either through conflict or often just through the shear number of white settlers encroaching on their territories; and in every war between the French and British they were used as pawns. As an aside, their practice of scalping wasn’t their own - that was brought about by the French and British, who paid their Native allies for every enemy scalp they could produce…

Fast forward to after the Revolutionary War. George Washington actually wanted to “be nice” to the native populations. He felt that republican (small r) principles of liberty could not be upheld while committing genocide and stealing the land that other people occupied (and no, the irony of his having this opinion and his being a slave owner did not escape him). He envisioned a system of integrating the US and Native populations together through a cooperative effort, a sort of assimilation in two directions. He had a great respect for Native cultures and especially their warrior spirit, and he hoped they would learn farming and become more “civilized,” a merging of the two cultures in every way. However, this effort ended up being doomed to failure, for several reasons. One, by this time Natives in the eastern half of the continent were collected in large “tribes” of related peoples, ruled by one person or just a few people, many of who were hostile at worst, or distrustful at best, regarding whites. Secondly, the treaties that Natives had made with the “whites” in the past had always been ignored by white settlers, so why would treaties with the US be any different. Thirdly, some of the Southern US states (Georgia in particular) wanted the lands to their west, and indeed claimed them under their own authority and began to settle the Native’s lands there, despite the treaties signed by Washington and the Native leader in that region (and ratification of the treaty by the US Senate), And fourthly, the Native leader in question (his name escapes me, but he was 3/4th “white”) was playing the US gov’t and the Spanish gov’t against each other, seeing who gave him and his people the best deal… which ultimately soured the deal altogether in the long run, on both sides.

The final straw, the event that signaled the beginning of the end for the major populations of Natives on the continent and made it nearly inevitable that they would be nearly wiped out, was the Louisiana Purchase. This entrenched the idea of “Manifest Destiny” into the mind of the average US citizen, the idea that the US was destined to fill the N. American continent from “Sea to Shining Sea.” And Jefferson sadly did not have the love and respect for the Natives that Washington had had; indeed, one of his goals for making the Purchase, among other things, was to make sure that whites would some day populate the entirety of what is now the continental US. The Purchase was, therefore, one of Jefferson’s greatest triumphs and also one of his greatest failings.

The rest is, as they say, history. Through a series of systematic and no-so-systematic wars and resettlement programs, killing and pushing the Natives farther and farther west, they were removed from most of the continental US and placed in “Reservations,” where forced re-teaching programs and poverty have all but wiped out their cultures. Thankfully, some continue to teach their traditional cultures and languages, and some universities near many of the reservations have begun holding courses in native culture and languages.