Actually, I know that disease was responsible for the majority of it, and am (with the exception of the infamous pox blanket incident) attributing their deaths to a super large scale (and really grim) "oopsie." This still doesn't mitigate forced enslavement, forced conversions, conquests or brutal executions of those who rebelled. Also, as you've opened this up from Columbus to to Europeans in general, are you sure you really want to talk about what happened in North America as well? Because stats start to get much more specific as time goes on.
Well, yes, a lot of those things did happen. Most of them were wrong, and inexcusable, from a modern perspective.
Again, however, to try and paint this as being something intrinsic to European dealings with the natives alone would be something of a mistake. Have you read about the atrocities Europeans committed against other Europeans during the Thirty Years War, for instance, or any of the other various rebellions and wars of religion which occurred between Catholics, Protestants, and Muslims in the same era that the European colonization of the Americas was taking place?
To put it bluntly, they'll make your hair stand on end.
This wasn't just true of Europeans either. The Native Americans were just as bad, if not worse, as was just about
every other people on earth in that era.
The simple fact of the matter is that it was just a more brutal time in general, where, often violent, authoritarianism was the way of the world, and life was commonly regarded as being rather cheap. In that context, trying to differentiate things in terms of "right" and "wrong" through a modern cultural lens simply doesn't work.
Frankly, there's no more sense in a modern American feeling "guilty" about their ancestors' treatment of the Native Americans, than there is in a modern Italian feeling guilty about his people's treatment of the French under the Roman Empire.
Such events were simply a product of the times in which they occurred. Those times are now in the past, where they should remain.
It's not so much that I feel bad about it as that I don't believe we need to celebrate it.
It is because of the actions of your forebearers that you are even here to feel guilty about them in the first place.
Celebrate that, if nothing else.