The relatively dispersed nature of the Americas, as opposed to Catholic-controlled Europe, also made the native tribes more vulnerable to impingement from outside, as they could not easily unite against an attack. They also lacked the large numbers for complex military organizations and the resources to create technologically-advanced forms of military warfare. However, one uniting aspect to the native tribes was the respect they had for the land. The Europeans met people who viewed the land a different and more reverent attitude than themselves, not because the tribes were primitive, but because the Indians' land was so tight-fisted in yielding its bounty. The land could not be easily dominated by the cultivation of man, as it was, relatively speaking in Europe. Even native agricultural societies could not trust the land, thus they worshipped their food crop, corn, in the Mesoamerican regions of the world, rather than the more complex theological systems...

A lack of time to devote to building elaborate religious structures in many areas seemed to confirm the idea that these were a people without a religion as well as without a land to the Europeans.
The native tribes had less time to devote to cultivating technology for warfare and sea navigation, which also placed them at the mercy of European colonizers. The Europeans judged them according to their universalizing cultural system, which was characterized by desire for land and status, and viewed civilization in terms of owning and demarcating the land according to maps, as well as the presence of a written language. Under this narrow, stark and judgmental criterion native tribes invariably fell short. A final difficulty the natives would encounter would be the lack of immunity to European diseases -- the isolated nature of the Americas isolated these tribes from many of the pathogens that had afflicted Europe for centuries.