As for democracy, it isn't particularly racist to think that democracy might never have been developed elsewhere. I mean, perhaps, over the course of thousands of years, it might have again with all the right conditions. But it's clearly super rare: in all of 200000 years of human history only ONE civilization (the West) came up with Democracy.
It is vastly harder to come up with (in the sense of requiring more complex and delicate preconditions) than even gunpowder.
You mean the Ancient Greeks developing one form of democracy? The West isn’t a monolithic civilization. It’s a bunch of civilizations, and was hugely influenced by the Eastern and Mesopotamian civilizations via the Silk Road.
Athens became a democracy in 507 BC. Rome became a republic two years earlier in 509 BC. I don’t think one came assume with certainty that Rome was only a democracy because of the Greeks. I think that there was “something in the air” as to how the city-states developed in the Mediterranean that allowed a few to begin experimenting with democracy beyond tribal and village councils, that eventually led to democratic states. If someone can point to examples of democratic governance in the ancient world beyond the tribal/village level outside of Europe I’d be very much interested in learning about it. It’s been a subject I’ve had some interest for since I was in college many decades ago. I asked a history professor of Chinese descent if he knew of any examples, and he came up with nothing. More progress in history since then may have revealed an example, or he might not have known because his focus was on ancient Chinese philosophy as a historical topic rather than governance.
(I don’t say this to pound my chest to say “Hooray, I’m part of the West, and we invented democracy!” Nobody alive today invented democracy. We’ve inherited it. At best some of us have expanded or reformed it, but I think it’s also quite possible we may turn away from it.)
I think we (and I include myself) sometimes forget that democracy is not the norm of human governance throughout history, and until fairly recently it wasn’t even that common.
Could democracy have developed in the Americas in the 700 year period where the native people advanced from Neolithic technology to what we have to call science-fiction levels of technology? Perhaps, but what I find even more difficult to believe is that on the technological front they compressed about 5,000 years of technological advancement in only 700 years, especially with the presence of psionics. Psionics is basically science-fiction magic, and the existence of magic would retard the advance of science and technology.
The real problem with the setting isn’t whether or not it’s ideas for how technological and societal advancement would progress. If someone wants to suspend their sense of disbelief that’s not really a big deal. We all do it in games and fiction all the time. The real problem is that they’ve created a setting centered on getting rid of the unwanted Other, being non-Native Americans. They even did it clumsily. Nothing prevents them from having a setting with advance technology centered on the Americas 50,000 years in the past. Plenty for fiction has supposed advanced civilizations existing a very long time ago, that then later fell before the current ones we know about. But that wouldn’t have the same jump to the creators endorphin levels of removing the Other, and this project does seem to very much be motivated by bigoted thinking that wants to imagine a alternate “current” world as a kind of racist wish fulfillment without having to consider non-Native Americans.
At least since Star Trek science-fiction has included the idea of multiple races being part of the future. Science fiction that was all-white was either pre Star Trek laziness in that regard, or deliberate racism. Coyote and Crow is making the deliberate step to exclude non-Native Americans. This goes beyond imagining an alternate history where the Americas weren’t colonized by the European powers.