In all honesty, a lot of the old westerns did not depict the old West accurately. Many showed the Native Americans as nothing but evil with no redeeming qualities. I believe that many of what they called "Injuns" had very legitimate gripes -- enough to commit violence -- I surely would have. I think modern audiences now know this because they haven't been brainwashed by the text books that I had to read when I was a kid. You know, the Manifest Destiny crap-beliefs we were taught. The plundering of the Native Americans is just one aspect of the old west and depicted in many Westerns.
I see and understand where you're coming from, although I cringe at your dismissal of Manifest Destiny as "crap-beliefs we were taught." Manifest Destiny was a historical reality--for many years Americans thought it was their destiny to domesticate and produce and live in and rule this continent from the East Coast to the West Coast, with no infringement from other nations. I'm not saying that justified some of the things that happened but there was a strong conviction among Americans that they were destined to establish, preserve and push forward a nation like no other. But its depiction is not limited to American Westerns. You can see it in films like
The Wind and the Lion when the US, Germany, and other nations compete to influence the berbers of North Africa. You can see the British version of Manifest Destiny in
Lawrence of Arabia,
The Man Who Would be King,
Khartom,
Zulu,
55 Days in Peking (I think that title's off) where representatives from the US, Japan, England, France, you name it, have to stand off the Boxer Rebellion in China. It's also there in all its jingoistic glory with Steve McQueen in
The Sand Pebbles. Point being there was a historic belief in Manifest Destiny that wasn't limited to the US or to Western movies.
There may have been Westerns where all Indians were portrayed as evil--I can't remember them all. But I do remember many in which "good" Indians were in as much danger from the "bad" Indians as were the whites and even some in which I could even understand the motivations of the "bad" ones. But I think Indians have a lot more problems--health and education issues as well as a high percentage of alcoholism--than how their ancestors were portrayed in movies.
But when you get right down to it, in the American West, South America, Africa, Australia, South Sea Islands and Asia, the aboriginal peoples were living virtually in the stone age when they came into contact with the more technological advanced Europeans. And there was no way they could compete with the new settlers. And those who were traditionally nomad hunters and gathers, following the animal herds from one seasonal grazing ground to another, were bound to clash with the Europeans who build houses and fences on the land they claimed. And once the new arrivals began to farm and graze cattle on the plains of the Midwest, the giant buffalo herds and the Indians who depended on them had to go. Because you can't build a town, raise a crop or graze cattle on a piece of land where a million buffalo pass through a couple of times each year. And it sure raises hell with later efforts to lay railroad tracks across those migratory trails. Everything was stacked against the aborigines right from the start--even if no one ever lifted a hand against them, their old way of life was doomed when they became dependent upon the European immigrants for metal tools and weapons, guns, ammo, cloth rather than skins. Unable to make any of those things themselves, they soon were totally dependent on the very people who were settling the land they used to roam. It's got nothing to do with who's good or who's bad--it's all about who is best able to adapt and survive in that changing world. And the local natives just couldn't cut it.