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In most animal species, intra species conflict is typically centered on mating and access to easier food resources.
It’s just not as violent as human warfare. The goal isn’t to kill your opponent, it’s an evolutionary disadvantage for a social species to kill its own, it’s simply to assert dominance and claim the small pile of food/sex that’s up for grabs. That’s not to say it’s not violent or deadly, animals die after such fights all the time, but killing isn’t the goal.
Most tribal conflict in North America before the whites showed up was like this. Sure, you’d raid a weaker tribe, take their women and buffalo, chase them from the area, but pitched battle where the goal is to kill as many of your enemy as possible and destroy them utterly wasn’t really part of it.
Don’t buy into some racist narrative of the evil whites spreading their own version of warfare, every group in the world makes this transition when they go from a tribal society to an organized civilization. The Bantu in Africa killed or displaced the vast majority of bushmen and other indigenous tribes south of the Sahara using this kind of warfare, the Chinese and Indians were doing it for thousands of years, in Central America the Aztecs had their own brand of ultraviolence.
But the core of the myth has a foundation in truth, most peoples in North America lived in tribal groups much closer to a state of nature than the European settlers.
