His gross miscalculation led to him landing on the Americas, and since he did not want to be found wanting over his inadequacy of sailing from Europe to India, he decided to rename the Native Americans as, 'American Indians' and write his letters back to the Kingdom of Spain as to have found 'the Indians'. .
This was called the age of discovery, where massive populations of Native Americans were enslaved and killed if they did not conform to the new ways introduced to them by the settlers. Their populations shrunk due to these murders, new diseases the Native Americans never had immunity for. As time went on, Native American populations shrunk while the settler's populations expanded. An example statistic is, when the settlers settled on the American coast in 1770, over 30% of Native Americans were wiped out in a span of a few decades, thanks to measles and small pox. During the American Revolution, native America's played a vital role in the war. Most tribes joined the British during the war, making this one of the bigger deals when issues ranging from sovereignty to territorial rule came up, after the British lost the war. After the war, the Indians gave the new country a new identity, distinct from the British culture. An identity that was neither savage nor civilized. .
Washington viewed the Indians as equals, as did most of the founding fathers, but they also viewed their civilizations as backward, as a result, the United States initiated a policy to civilize the 'backward culture' of Native Americans. This was embraced for a while using various legislation procedures ,but as time went and the settlers expanded in quest for more lands for farming, the native Americans started resisting the encroachment of their lands by the settlers.
In 1845, the term "Manifest Destiny" was coined to support the territorial expansion of the US. This lead to the unhinged annexation of huge chunks of lands previously held by Native Americans, such as entire swaths of states in todays' Oregon, Texas and the Washington state.
