I actually read a lot. A couple of recent books include War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, and Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage. One quote from the former sums it up: "The dogs of war were seldom on a leash" in the pre-Colombian New World. 

Another quote: "Quantitative body counts—such as the proportion of prehistoric skeletons with ax marks and embedded arrowheads or the proportion of men in a contemporary foraging tribe who die at the hands of other men—suggest that pre-state societies were far more violent than our own."

I don't reject your notion that natives came out on the bad side of things. What I reject is your apparent believe that they could not or did not engage in exactly the same activities.