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CB: I believe it was U.S. Supreme Court Justice Powell who said in an analogous analysis that one is presumed to intend the necessary and logical consequences of one's actions. It was foreseeable to the U.S. government and private institutions of U.S. society that their actions would and were annihilating the indigneous population. As you say below, "the practical results were the same" . The effective results were the same as if it was a systematic conscious policy.
The U.S. Supreme Court just made a decision reitertating its use of "lack of evidence of intent to discriminate" as a basis for 14th Amendment causes of actions against racism to fail. This is analogous to your comment that it is difficult to prove a systematic policy. It parallels what were termed "de jure" and "de facto" segregation in the early modern civil rights cases. It is the loophole that has been used by rightwing racist jurisprudence since the Burger Court started it in the 70's to avoid the doctrine of the case of _Brown v the Bd of Ed._ ( main modern civil rights case precedent).
In general, racists have rapidly learned to hide direct evidence of intent to discriminate, today, but in the time periods you are talking about, there was little effort to hide the genocidal attitude toward Indians.
Actually, I think with more research it will become clear to you that the notion that "the only good indian was a dead indian" and the like was openly espoused by many European invaders , before the beginning of the U.S. and after. The Europeans did not have an sense of hiding their concepts that the indigenous peoples were "savages" and "heathens" and other beings unworthy of possession of the land and resources of the continent, so the whites openly discussed this and wrote about it.
-Thank you for the background. I will try to enlarge research. Would you agree with demographic data here?
Alexandre Fenelon