Many townies of my vintage will recall occasional Saturday matinees in the Regal or Ritz cinemas in the late 1950s and early 1960s, watching Cowboy and Indian ‘flicks’.

In those innocent days, we would ride our ponies back home after the film, slapping our thighs and whooping, and determined to rid our town of "pesky injuns".

I recall one long ago Saturday on Bryson's bridge when I was lying on my back on the path, with Packie Quinn sitting astride me, pinning my arms to the ground with his knees.

He was waving an imaginary tomahawk in the air, and was re-enacting a scene from the film in which the innocent white man was to be scalped, when a sudden thunderous roar rent the air:

"Get up off that boy and stop that carry-on."

We looked up into the cross face of my formidable aunt Maggie, who was down from Omagh to visit for the day – embarrassment overload, but scalping avoided!

It was only years afterwards that I began to realise how brainwashed we had been by the Hollywood presentation of the Native American experience: the U.S. Cavalry, resplendent in their blue uniforms with yellow trim, were all decent men upholding law and order, while the Indians were ruthless savages with painted faces who were constantly engaged in ambush and attack.

The reality, of course, was far more nuanced. The history of the treatment of the Native American tribes by white settlers, and by U.S. governments from the beginning, is at best inglorious, and at worst, truly shocking.

The ‘Indians’ – or peaux-rouge (redskins) – had a long history of providing friendly help to explorers who entered their territories.

The Tainos had so warmly welcomed Christopher Columbus in 1492 that he wrote to the King and Queen of Spain:

"So tractable, so peaceable are these people, that I swear to your Majesties there is not in the world a better nation. They love their neighbours as themselves, and their discourse is ever sweet and gentle, and accompanied with a smile; and though it is true they are naked, yet their manners are decorous and praiseworthy."

A decade later, the tribe was virtually destroyed through kidnapping and killing for resistance to forced conversion – villages were burned, and men, women and children were shipped to Europe as slaves.

In 1607, the Powhatans in Virginia supplied the white settlers with food and co-operated with them.

Within a few years, the 8,000 Powhatans were reduced to less than 1,000.

When the Pilgrim Fathers landed in Plymouth in 1620, the Wampanoags shared corn with them, gave them seeds to plant, and ensured their survival through their first viciously cold winter there.

By 1675, the Wampanoags had been exterminated.

Thus began a sordid history of harassment by cavalrymen, gold-miners, homesteaders, fur traders, buffalo hunters, cowboys, railroad companies and government agencies with their broken promises, ignored treaties, forced marches to reservations (including the infamous ‘Trail of Tears’), endless skirmishes and occasional massacres, particularly from 1860 to 1890.

Last month, my wife, Maureen, my son, Shane, and myself undertook our third American road trip – a 5,503-mile odyssey from Los Angeles eastward.

A particular focus of this was engagement with the Native American experience during those critical 30 years when the civilization and culture of the American Indian was finally destroyed.

I would like to share just two of our encounters with you.

On June 25, 1876, General George Armstrong Custer led his soldiers into the Little Bighorn Valley in south-east Montana to eliminate a teepee village of "hostile" Indians.

He ran into a huge gathering of 3,000 Plains Indians – Sioux and Cheyenne, led by Sitting Bull, who wished to protect the nomadic and independent existence of his people.

Custer's famed 7th Cavalry, many of whom were Irish, was annihilated, and he, along with his brothers, Tom and Boston, died at what is now known as Last Stand Hill.

Custer lost 263 soldiers in the battle, one of whom was Carlow man, Captain Miles Keogh, whose horse, Comanche, was the only cavalry battlefield survivor at Little Big Horn, or Greasy Grass as the Indians called it.

Indian casualties were just under 100.

We took a self-guided, 10-mile tour of the battle site accompanied by vivid lightning, playful packs of little prairie dogs, and rattlesnakes sleeping in the grass.

The most impressive element of the memorial site on Last Stand Hill is the tribute to the Indians who died in the battle.

It took until the year 2003 – 127 years after the battle – for this to be acknowledged and included. For most of that time, it was known as the Custer Battlefield National Monument.

While Bighorn was the pinnacle of Indian resistance, it was also a pyrrhic victory.

President Ulysses Grant was so infuriated by the defeat that he intensified a military campaign which, 14 years later after the last Indian defeat at Wounded Knee, meant that there wasn't a single free Native American left outside of reservations.

Wounded Knee in South Dakota was the place I most wanted to visit on this road trip.

On December 29, 1890, a bedraggled band of Sioux families moving through freezing winter snow was intercepted by U.S. Army troops.

Their leader, Big Foot, terminally ill from pneumonia, immediately surrendered, and the party was escorted to nearby Wounded Knee.

The intention was to transfer them to a military prison in Omaha, Nebraska.

While there, almost 300 of those 350 Sioux men, women and children were massacred, including their dying chief, Big Foot.

It was the end of what was termed ‘the Indian Wars’, and the end of independent Native Americans on the Great Plains.

Visiting the site of the massacre and the nearby simple graveyard was a moving experience.

A local Lakota Sioux family joined us in the graveyard, showed us the grave of Lost Bird, and wanted us to know her story.

As a baby, she had lain beside the body of her murdered mother in the snow for four days before being discovered alive.

She was passed around among the soldiers before being adopted by one of them.

She had a very hard life before dying and being buried in California at the age of 30.

The local Sioux had her body exhumed and re-interred at Wounded Knee, still an isolated and impoverished place beside the Pine Ridge reservation – just one of the casualties of that horrific event, and a far cry from the simplicities of the Ritz and Regal cinemas for us youngsters in 1960.