re: misunderstandings
I find this very suggestive of a folklore that came out of hard practical experience. The alternative is to believe in the sheer coincidence of people across a continent being struck at random with a set of religious beliefs which also just happened to have utility in staying alive and prospering. It's simpler to posit that they're the oral tradition recording the lessons learned during the period of adaptation to a long and steep decline in game populations, and the transition from an expansionist pioneer lifestyle to a longterm steady-state lifestyle.
If I had taken the time to extend my earlier reply I would have made that particular observation myself. After several hundred, if not thousand generations of subsistence hunting-gathering the harsh lessons must have been learned the hard way. The life of most native peoples wasn’t an easy one. Starvation was one bad hunt, one extended drought, one crippling injury away. Large groups would have fragmented, in time splitting into smaller groups, constantly moving to prevent overuse of resources would have become a way of life. (Before someone starts berating me for forgetting a number of agri-based NA cultures, I’m generally restricting myself to the more nomadic plains tribes simply because I’m far more familiar with them.)
In longer terms, a social structure to enforce such behaviors would be inevitable.
Domesticated stock were virtually non-existent on this continent when Euros arrived. Buffalo do not domesticate well, nor do deer. Ask anyone who’s ever tried to herd them, I have, it’s damn near impossible.
For some reason widespread agriculture seems to have been spotty at best. I am well aware of the numbers of farming tribes, even then many were forced to hunt. Protein is still best derived from meat. The culture would have evolved to fit each area.
If certain traditional folks who I am well acquainted with personally heard me say the above, I would be chastised for the opinion. Heresy is not well received, nor restricted to any belief system.
In some of Jared Diamond's work that I've read recently, he examines what happened to the Anasazi. Diamond's conclusion is that they were done-in by climate change that they themselves had caused. They deforested the region for building materials and firewood. Their extensive above-ground irrigation systems over time silted-in and raised the salt concentration of the water table to levels that destroyed agriculture.
From what I’ve read, that summary would be fairly accurate.
Another case would be Easter Island, the deforestation by humans, which changed the micro-climate, some thousand years ago. The culture was unable to produce crops, or find sufficient potable water due to lack of rainfall, caused by deforestation. In a short time a thriving population with sufficient spare time to carve and set those statues was reduced to a starving few hundred bedraggled souls by the time European ships made landfall there. (Don’t hold my feet in the fire over the precise accuracy of that, I’m working from memory on it.)