That’s close to a quote from the jerk boss in the sitcom “The Middle.”
So, what should have happened when Europeans realized there was something really worth all that sailing and vomiting to get across the Atlantic, and why?
I voted “incorporate them”. You can’t stuff the genie back in the bottle - *someone *on Columbus’ crew would have blabbed.
No-one is around to want the Celts out of Britain. But there are several Celt groups who’d like the English to leave…
It wasn’t right by today’s standards. By the standards of yesteryear, it could have been an awful lot worse.
Honestly, though, I think we could have skipped all the stuff in the middle of the country and just taken the coasts. 
“Incorporate the Indians as respected members of society and compensate them for their land” is probably the best of those options. Especially since “someone invent sanitation, penicillin and smallpox vaccine a century or two earlier so most of the population lives” isn’t on the list.
Um, how? Genocide, slavery, torture, you name it; they did it all. Short of raising their victims from the dead and killing them twice, how could it have been “an awful lot worse”?
How about: “You cannot impose the standards of today on the people of long ago.”
Of course you can. We act better than them because we are better than them. It’s called progress.
How could it have been worse? They already used genocide, slavery, torture, mass rape and forced religious conversion. What did they leave out?
As to the OP, it leaves out an option that would not have been realistic at the time, but is exactly what would happen now, and that is to establish diplomatic relations with the native peoples and work out trade deals.
Realistically for the time, though, there was no way to avoid what happened. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t deplorable.
You’re a moral relativist, huh?
Of course we are. The point is that we’re also better than more or less everyone else who might have gone a-conquerin’ between 1492 and, say, 1900.
So what? How does that excuse anything?
It doesn’t excuse anything. The people who indiscriminately slaughtered, raped, and enslaved the Indians were very, very bad.
However, the OP’s question is “what should have happened?” Obviously, native Americans should have been compensated for their land, and incorporated into the new society; but that’s simply not a plausible outcome in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when Europeans simply didn’t think that way.
Deleted - misunderstood post.
You really can’t apply modern thinking to ages past. These days we recognize that everything done to the New World by Europeans was wrong on many levels for many reasons, but to someone back then our arguements would sound ludricous.
The idea that the subhuman natives(they couldn’t possibly be our equals! Just look at them!) shouldn’t be placed in slavery or conquered would not sale, and we actually have history to prove it. I don’t remember names, and I have no cites, but I do recall that there was one priest working in the New World who embarked on the revolutionary idea that it was immoral to enslave a people based on their ethnicity and that we had conquered their lands. He was largely ignored and passed off as an idiot. His efforts to get anyone to listen to him were entirely fruitless because to the thinking of back then there was nothing moral or amoral about what they were doing. They just did it.
And by today’s moral standards, we wouldn’t have colonized anyway and your incorporating and compensating idea wouldn’t happen. More than likely it would only be corporations moving their headquarters offices to America for tax reasons, and a bunch of single retirees who like the women. 
Certainly I can. That sort of argument only works if you aren’t willing to say that we have ethically advanced over them. If you are, then there’s no problem at all with judging and condemning them for their behavior.
And the fact that such people existed only further condemns the people of that era. It was well within their ability to recognize that what they were doing was wrong; they refused to. Their entire civilization was evil.
Wouldn’t the vast majority of Indians who died after Columbus – which is to say the vast majority of Indians, period – have done so anyway due to disease? If that’s so, then in a sense it didn’t matter much what the Europeans did afterwards: the majority of native inhabitants would be dead and their civilizations destroyed anyway.
Bartolome de las Casas? He advocated for the abolition of Indian slavery and the end of forcible conversion. He was more or less successful, though. He won the debate with Sepulveda (about whether or not Indians were naturally inferior). The New Laws were passed and Indian slavery was outlawed.
How about: “What ‘we’ did to the Indians was a perfectly OK thing to do then, and would be a perfectly OK thing to do today.”
Also, for you “incorporate them into our society” people, what’s your plan for those Indians who didn’t want to be incorporated (a number approaching damn near all of them, best I can tell)?
umm…the Indians didn’t think that way either…
Each tribe jealously and violently guarded its territory from other tribes…
There’s a reason why they were such skilled horsemen, and so good at shooting arrows accurately while at a full gallop, and had elaborate cultural systems of war paint and war dances.
It was 500 years ago. Let it go already. They did what they did, and the world kept turning. Quite frankly, there were a couple of those cultures that deserved to be eradicated utterly. Glad the Spanish were so efficient at it.
Killing people and stealing their land is perfectly OK?