“Starvation is a powerful motivator.”

From The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee by David Treuer

In Treur’s telling of the story of the Europeans conquest of the North American Indians almost everything the USA tried to mitigate the consequences of the rout turned out badly. The question in my mind is: What could we have done better. It seems that there was not a path that even in hindsight would have made the outcome significantly better.

The quote above is a synopsis of how the Americans often got the natives to sign treaties.