Stories like this were one of the most interesting things I learned with home schooling. When you are bringing information to your kids to teach them about history, you want it to be accurate so, if you are like me, you try to find a number of sources about major events. And what I discovered was how these events are slanted, sometimes radically so, in service to a particular narrative.
Of the few things we found that were pretty universal, one was that a lot of people died from disease, before, during, and after people from Europe were visiting the American continents (both North and South), and upper class Europeans were often unashamedly racists and classists.
The origin of these appear to be the lack of understanding about diseases (transmission and virality) and our inability to proactively protect ourselves (vaccinate). And the history of feudal warlords favoring 'bloodlines' over individual competence. Often looking at events from the present, with the benefit if hindsight and greater knowledge, its easy to see how things could have been avoided and so it is easy to believe that they weren't avoided due to malice. And taking advantage of that, a number of historians have painted events to look like either malice of their enemies or heroism of their allies, rather than a dispassionate retelling of facts and figures.
Even today we see tragic events quickly contextualized into a conspiracy of shadowy groups with malicious agendas. when those re-contextualized accounts become the only surviving account, we lose a lot of perspective.