I don't subscribe to the "Noble Savage" mythology. I'm not of the mind that European culture is all that great but somehow the technological leaps happened and those who stayed low-tech got crushed. The cycle will repeat, don't worry--we must be close to some tipping point of decadence.
In Colorado, there's still some veneration of Buffalo Bill, whose claim to fame was killing buffalo with such efficiency that only the pelts were harvested from the rotting corpses blanketing the plains.