In this dissertation I argue that, in terms of the wars with Native Americans on the North American Continent, military technology played a part in the Indians' ultimate defeat; however, contrary to much of the current writing in this area, it was, in reality but a small part of that defeat. My thesis is that the Indians succumbed on the battlefield to a mosaic of inter-related factors which eventually overwhelmed them, and their ability to make war. The views of Jared Diamond, Geoffrey Parker, William Thompson, and James Gibson's synopsis of Technowar, were examined with an eye to discovering their usefulness as devices to illuminate the causes of the Native Americans' military defeat, and all were found to be incomplete in their explanations.

With John Muir's insight that everything in the universe is bound to every other thing as a guide, six case studies based on Prof. Peter Nabokov's classification of the Indian Wars were undertaken to determine if examples of Native American battlefield successes could be of assistance in creating a paradigm of Native American warfare and the role of technology as one of the variables in that model. These studies include: the Jamestown Massacre, the Pueblo Revolt, Little Turtle's thrashing of the United States Army, The Minnesota Uprising, Red Cloud's War, and the Battle of the Little Big Horn.

The overall pattern that emerged from the study was that the reasons for the defeat of the Indigenous Peoples are much more complex than simple theories based on superior European/ American technology would suggest. By isolating, examining, and eliminating the variable of military technology as one of the primary causes of Native American defeat, it has been demonstrated that a myriad of demographic, biological, cultural, environmental, and linguistic factors interacted with each other to produce a downward spiral that almost succeeded in causing the extinction of the Native American peoples, in what I call the Holistic Thesis of Native American Military Defeat.