The big problems began after the Americans became independent. Before that, the white settlements were all along the coast, and they seemed to be getting on okay with the Indians. The biggest problem in pre-Independence times was the spread of European diseases, which wiped out large numbers of Native Americans. During the War of Independence, most tribes allied with the British, as they thought the British would stop the spread of colonies inland. It was after they started spreading inland that the big problems began.

It was both, actually. It is a common misinterpretation to believe that it was only after the Revolution that Native Americans were oppressed and forced off their land. This couldn't be further from the truth. One only needs to look at the tenuous and hostile relationship between the settlers of the Jamestown settlement and the Indians of the Powhatan Confederacy....a group of roughly 9 Algonquian tribes. To understand the dynamics between these groups it is important to understand that the English settlers approached the Native Americans with a sense of superiority....they saw the Indians as sub-human, unworthy of respect or tolerance, and immediately tried to subjugate them. Within two weeks of their arrival on Jamestown Island (1607) the settlers are confronted with an Indian attack....Frankly, I don't blame the Indians. The men of Jamestown were arrogant little SOB's. By 1622 the colonists number more than 1000. In that year a new Powhatan chieftain decides upon a sudden attack, killing 347 colonists in a single day. The most discreditable and reprehensible moment in the European reprisals occurs in 1623, when the English organize a peace conference. The Indians attending it are systematically murdered, some by poison and some by gunshot. Let's fast forward nearly 150 years to the end of the French and Indian War....the French troops have abandoned their forts, leaving their former allies, the Indians, at the mercy of the British. Pontiac, a chief of the Ottawa Indians, responds to the new situation by planning an uprising of the Indian tribes. Skilfully synchronized to begin in May 1763, with each tribe attacking a different fort, the campaign has an early and devastating success. Many garrisons are overwhelmed and massacred, in an attempt to drive the British back east of the Appalachians. But a ferocious counter-offensive is launched by the governor-general, Jeffrey Amherst. Amherst lacks any form of moral scruple in his treatment of tribes whom he regards as contemptible savages. He even suggests spreading smallpox by gifts of infected blankets (and Indians given blankets by the British, in a peace conference at Pittsburgh in 1764, do develop the disease). In the first flush of Pontiac's success, in 1763, the British government is so alarmed that a royal proclamation is issued; all land between the Appalachians and the Mississippi is to be reserved as hunting grounds for the Indians. But two years later the British army regains control of the situation. Pontiac makes formal peace in 1766, and the royal proclamation regarding the hunting grounds is soon forgotten, and once again, settlers begin pushing towards the West. And I could go on and on and on. So as you can see, the new American government took over where the former British government left off.

All of the above, and don't leave out the Spanish, French and Dutch. Natives had no written language and no metals and were perceived as savages with no real god, no government, no defenses..

It was all Europeans. Anytime a more technologically advanced culture comes in contact with a primitve culture there is going to be conflict. Count on it.

the brit empire was economic meaning if you pay us we will leave you alone but if your cheap labour or have somthing we want then your doomed. In that way the brit empire supressd some Natives and helprf others. The US chose to try to wipe out most of them move the rest along

Even in the earliest days of the first European explorers, there was conflict. Native Americans lived in a world based upon minimal rules & laws, an "absolute freedom", and Europeans lived in a society based upon the constraints of tyranny, so it's not too surprising. When the Choctaw people were first encountered by De Soto and his men, they engaged in fierce battles. Some of these encounters were written up in the diaries of the men accompanying De Soto.

I noticed no bothered to mention that it began with the Spanish under the guidance of the Catholic Church and their efforts to convert the Natives, and then proceeded to enslave them or murder them when they refused and If you think that the Biological Genocide was just an unfortunate accident you would be sadly mistaken, since Biologicals have been used since the days even before written history and Columbus didn't just leave those sick sailors by accident their history says otherwise and an unsuspecting trusting people were never really prepared for what hit them and as far as Jamestown's goes Rape is still Rape and religiously repressed people meeting scantily clad free and open women was a formula for disaster... ~Nemo~

Something of the quintessential loaded question, don't you think? The fact is niether the British government, nor the colonial governments, nor the State or Federal governments before Andrew Jackson "repressed" the Indians (at least in any sense of the word used by historians, anthropologists, and political scientists). They just never really took any territorial claims Indian tribes might have terribly seriously ... in part because the Indian tribes themselves had no actual idea of land ownership or tribal territory - they were, after all semi-nomadic, frequently fighting with each other over control of hunting grounds and the like. Also, the whole Scotch-Irish idea of squatters rights -- that the land belongs to the guy who's farming it, working it, and building on it, regardless of what the deed says -- was the principle driver of marginalization of Indians whose settlements moved and who practiced slash-and-burn agriculture. It wasn't "repression": it was just two different cultures in the same land, and one was explosively fecund, productive and expansive, and the other wasn't.

yes, and yes.

Were the colonists truly repressed?

the russians came from the north in ships along the pacific coast and raped and pilaged and stole tons of precious artifacts and killed many native americans besides spreading disease.