Not going there.  This debate is further evidence of the decolonialist vilification of Europeans and those of European descent.  They cant produce #'s because the only #'s around are all guesses, nobody knows how many Indians there were nor what percentage actually died during the colonisation of the New World.  Any #'s produced are essentially pure speculation.

I hate this topic with a passion.  Yes one can argue that the Europeans committed atrocities.  The Native Americans usually responded with atrocities of their own.  Technology and biology is what did the Native Americans in.  Small pox and the inability (read unwillingness) to adapt to European technology spelled their doom.  Furthermore, the Native Americans quarreled among themselves violently as well — had they been more united in the beginning, they might have stood a chance.  Sadly (or fortunately if you root for the Europeans) they could not.  

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Getting back to this, someone compared the treatment of the Native Americans to the way the Nazis acted and to their genocide.  In your opinion, does this have any basis?

If you throw out the technology and scope differences, maybe.  But historians should not be making these kinds of value judgments.  Sociologists and political scientists are better equipped to analyze this than historians.

First, I will talk about South american colonization by spanish conquistadors because i don't really know north america settlementToday, ethnologist prefer using the using the term of "ethnocide" instead of "genocide"  to designate what happened to native americans. It is admitted that first settlers had not the wish to destroy american people like Hitler did. It wasn't a premeditated undertaking.However, it's true spanish and english people wanted to take their lands, and for this they had to cut contacts between possible rebel fractions and with that all rests of what could unite natives like their culture or religion. Ethnocide means destroying culture, without respect of human differences. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EthnocideThey forbad religious practices, just like traditional funerals... That's why I'm surprised to read that

Regarding to the quantitative evolutions of native populations, we can neither say that it was a genocide because spanish people needed indians to reduce them in slavery. They were very violent during conquest wars and even after. Diseases also explain how natives population decreased very quickly. But spanish monarchy needed indians for manual activities and taxes (That's why monarchy sent religious orders to maintain indians populations and control settlers activities). Yet i admit that some demographic estimations are pure speculation.But, even if spanish could see how native populations could't stand diseases and technologies differences, they continued to impose them hard works like gold and silver mining (see Potosi mining and terrible conditions for natives). So, if it was't a planned project like what we call a genocide, it's was an ethnocide which had quantitative repercussions on natives mental hearth (and suicide propensity for instance) and which were accompanied of serious physical violences.

The issue seems to be ideologic. I don't think that technologic differences can explain the fact that people don't accept a foreign culture.Conquest and colonization have been plural, and human treatement has always been different. American colonization is very different from the XIXth century colonizations. In the XIXth, it was much more planned and a segregative system was decided.Every meeting between contrasted civilisations has not led to the Valladolid debate in which they try to define limits of humanity... This is what i'm talking about.

Notice, I did not make a moral judgment of the “rightness” or wrongness” of the conquest and colonization of the Americas.  I made a simple statement of fact, the natives of the Americas were not as technologically adept as the Europeans and they lost.  It also helped that the Europeans were fairly adept at making use of the existing inter-tribal and inter-clan rivalries and were pretty good at using one tribe against another.  That is what the Spanish did in conquering the Inca and what the British and French did in North America as well.I am not trying to impose contemporary morality an people 400 years dead.  I rather seek o explain the chain of cause and effect, the why of you will.  I want to explain why things happened the way they dead not impose my personal judgment on events.