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This quote from the book expresses the situation the Osage people found themselves in in the early 20th century:

At one congressional hearing, another Osage chief named Bacon Rind testified that the whites had "bunched us down here in the backwoods, the roughest part of the United States, thinking 'we will drive these Indians down to where there is a big pile of rocks and put them there in that corner.'" Now that the pile of rocks had turned out to be worth millions of dollars, he said, "everybody wants to get in here and get some of this money." (pp. 87-88)

Oil was found under tribal lands, and every member of the tribe received a share of the earnings when drilling rights were auctioned off, quickly making them rich, and ripe for exploitation. There were lots of ways this was done, but a common one was through marriage to an Osage and inheriting shares at the death of their spouse.

Local government and law enforcement were on the take too, so it was hard to find justice when Osage were quietly and not so quietly murdered. It took outsiders from the nascent FBI to unravel some of the plots, but even when that was done and people ended up in jail, many perpetrators were never prosecuted.

I've only had a vague sense of what the Spanish incursion into the Americas was like, from school or whatever other sources I've happened upon. Something about them forcing Christianity and generally massacring the peaceful indigenous people with guns. I got a different sense of things reading Bernal Díaz' account. These are some of the things that stood out to me:

• Hernan Cortes' campaign was only undertaken with the thinnest of government authorization, with several parties actively trying to stop him -- not because they thought it was morally wrong but because they wanted the spoils for themselves.
• There were a lot of people in Central America, with a large civilization.
• Díaz and his fellow soldiers seemed fairly devout in their faith, often ascribing their survival in battles or other good fortunes to the grace of God.
• Despite that, they seemed pretty OK with accepting Aztec women as gifts of diplomacy or trophies of war. Was chastity not an important virtue?
• Although they taught Christianity, one of their primary goals was steer the Aztecs away from their religion based on human sacrifice and cannibalism.
• Cortes was deft at diplomacy, gaining allies among various groups of Aztecs and generally tried to avoid fighting (until he got himself in such a precarious situation that taking Montezuma hostage was maybe the only way of surviving).
• Yes, there were muskets, but crossbows were also heavily used in battle by the Spanish.

The story is well told, including a "darkest hour" in the siege against the lake city of Mexico, when the Spanish have lost a battle wherein Cortes was nearly killed, many Spaniards were captured and sacrificed to idols, and their native allies abandon them.