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With many of North America's indiginous nations having a very war like tradition (both offensive and defensive), why do you think that most of thier martial traditions seem to have been either lost or ignored?
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I think it's down to a few factors really mate. The first thing you have to remember is how much the Native American population was damaged by the coming of whitey. First and foremost, there were the diseases that they brought with them that the natives didn't have the immune systems to combat. One estimate says that this factor alone wiped out as much as 80% of the native population. Of course on top of that there's the battles that followed and horrific events like Wounded Knee, which almost removed entire nations from the face of the earth. With all this happening, the impact on the Native Americans must have been simply massive, and it's easy to see how a great deal of knowledge and learning, martial and otherwise, would've been lost as a result.
Another issue is that most nations had no system of written record keeping. Knowledge was passed down, but everything, from religion to tribal history to combat technique, was an oral tradition. If the bloke with the know-how died of smallpox, everybody had to start over. In Europe, where the resurrection of long-dead martial arts is going through somewhat of a boom, even though there are no teachers of these styles alive anymore, it can still be done since most Western European nations were meticulous record keepers, and numerous highly detailed manuals have been found illustrating the techniques that were practiced. A Native American martial artist wishing to do the same with his nation's fighting arts faces a much, much harder task since the written materials just aren't available.
Another possible reason is that the warriors of many Native American nations quite happily accepted the gun and put it to good use. Any culture that has been through the same thing is bound to see a gradual erosion of its hand-to-hand arts. It's not that they are no longer necessary, but certainly no longer as necessary. The same thing happened with the European nations. In contrast, the Maori of New Zealand were seemingly less agreeable to the use of firearms in their conflicts with the Red Coats and, as a result, the practice of their martial skills, rau makau, still exists today (as anyone who's seen
Once Were Warriors can attest!). The Japanese also. Granted they happily adopted the harquebus from a very early stage, but this was a weapon so cumbersome, so inaccurate, and so ridiculously user-unfriendly that you still needed good hand-to-hand skills to be of any worth on the battlefield. And they didn't change this weapon until the Meiji Restoration some 300 years later.
So with all this, in my mind, you've got a recipe for lost martial arts. In my time, I've only ever come across one authentic Native American art still being practiced and that's an Inuit wrestling style called una tar tuq. Like Celtic styles, there's been a few attempts to create styles "in the spirit" of Native American culture, two of the most popular being Inikte and Tushka-homa (aka Red Warrior). Inikte, as far as I can tell, is actually a synthesis of Asian systems. Tushka-homa, on the other hand, while the work of an 8th degree black belt in American kenpo (Adrian Roman) does not simply seem to be Native American kenpo. I've heard good reports of this system and that it has a very un-Asian feel to it. It's therefore a shame that Mr. Roman blows all credibility by selling black-belt correspondance courses in his system for $1,000 a time...